In 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States began investigating the national security implications of TikTok’s collection of American data. And in 2020, then-president Donald Trump threatened to ban the app entirely over concerns that the Chinese government could use ByteDance to amass dossiers of personal information about US TikTok users. TikTok’s “data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information,” Trump wrote in his executive order. TikTok has said it has never shared user data with the Chinese government and would not do so if asked, reports Buzzfeed.

Further, Buzzfeed reported on June 17 that “For years, TikTok has responded to data privacy concerns by promising that information gathered about users in the United States is stored in the United States, rather than China, where ByteDance, the video platform's parent company, is located. But according to leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings, China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users — exactly the type of behavior that inspired former president Donald Trump to threaten to ban the app in the United States.

The recordings, which were reviewed by BuzzFeed News, contain 14 statements from nine different TikTok employees indicating that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least.”

The BuzzFeed report prompted FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to write to both Apple and Google on Tuesday, requesting the companies to remove TikTok from their respective app stores for “its pattern of surreptitious data practices.” Review the letter in full below.

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After BuzzFeed News published its report, TikTok quickly went on the defense and announced that it is moving all US users’ data to Oracle servers situated in the country. It specified that the company still uses its own US and Singapore-based servers for backup. But in the future, it expects to “delete U.S. users’ private data from our own data centers and fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers located in the U.S,” according to TechCrunch.

The use of Oracle servers to store U.S. data was to occur during the Trump administration. So who dropped the ball?

In 2018, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook visited ByteDance in Beijing and was greeted like a Rock Star.