China insisted Friday it doesn’t ask firms to hand over knowledge gathered abroad, because the Chinese-owned TikTok faces mounting requires a ban within the United States.
Pressure is constructing on the massively in style video-sharing app — owned by the Chinese agency Bytedance — to acquire new possession or lose entry to the large US market.
In a gruelling five-hour listening to with US lawmakers Thursday, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew confronted relentless questioning from combative US lawmakers on each side of the political aisle over the app’s ties to China and its hazard to teenagers.
At the crux of a lot of the fears over TikTok is a 2017 Chinese regulation that requires native companies to hand over private knowledge to the state whether it is related to nationwide safety.
Beijing on Friday denied it might ask Chinese companies to hand over knowledge gathered abroad and claimed it “attaches great importance to protecting data privacy”.
China “has never and will not require companies or individuals to collect or provide data located in a foreign country”, international ministry spokesperson Mao Ning instructed a daily briefing.
“The US government has so far not provided any evidence that TikTok poses a threat to its national security,” Mao added.
In one significantly heated alternate Thursday, Chew was pressured to acknowledge that some private knowledge of Americans was nonetheless topic to Chinese regulation, however insisted that will quickly be modified.
The agency additionally acknowledged in November that some staff in China may entry European consumer knowledge after which admitted in December that staff had used the information to spy on journalists.
But the group has insisted that the Chinese authorities has no management over or entry to its knowledge.
“ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese government and is a private company,” Chew instructed lawmakers in his opening remarks, referring to TikTok’s China-based father or mother firm.
“We believe what’s needed are clear transparent rules that apply broadly to all tech companies — ownership is not at the core of addressing these concerns,” Chew added.
The Harvard-educated former banker failed to defuse an existential menace to TikTok because the app seeks to survive a White House ultimatum that it both cut up from its Chinese possession or be banned within the United States.
Lawmakers from the House Energy and Commerce Committee afforded Chew no respite, ceaselessly denying him alternatives to broaden on his solutions or tout the location’s large world reputation with younger folks.
Project Texas
A ban could be an unprecedented act on a media firm by the US authorities, slicing off the nation’s 150 million month-to-month customers from an app that has grow to be a cultural powerhouse — particularly for younger folks.
“TikTok has repeatedly chosen the path for more control, more surveillance and more manipulation. Your platform should be banned,” committee chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers stated.
Supporters of TikTok and free speech activists criticised the listening to as political theatre and urged towards an outright ban.
“Taking a bludgeon to TikTok, and by extension to Americans’ First Amendment protections, is not the right solution to the risks that TikTok poses to the privacy of Americans and to the national security of the United States,” stated Nadine Farid Johnson of PEN America, which defends free speech.
And Beijing famous on Friday that “some in the US congress stated that seeking a ban of TikTok is a xenophobic political persecution”.
TikTok nonetheless hopes to appease the authorities.
Chew’s testimony promoted the corporate’s elaborate plan — referred to as Project Texas — to fulfill nationwide safety issues, underneath which the dealing with of US knowledge will probably be ring-fenced right into a US-run division.
But lawmakers poured doubts on the undertaking, saying it might do nothing to take away their issues that TikTok was susceptible to China.
