Six urgent questions TikTok’s CEO needs to answer for US lawmakers
T ikTok’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, will be questioned by lawmakers in Washington on Thursday with the app’s US future in severe doubt. The Biden administration wants TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell their stakes in the business or face a complete ban in the US. TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance.
TikTok says such a move would not “solve the problem”. Under a plan dubbed Project Texas, which the White House now appears to have rejected, TikTok is moving its US user data to third party servers and is allowing its source code to be scrutinised by Oracle, a US tech firm which will also vet its app updates.
For the White House and many US lawmakers, this does not go far enough to answer concerns about whether TikTok’s data, from more than 1 billion users, can be accessed by the Chinese state and whether TikTok’s recommendation algorithm could be manipulated by the security services in order to influence what users see.
Here are some the questions that Chew, a Singaporean former Goldman Sachs banker, could be asked at the House energy and commerce committee hearing, which starts at 10am ET Thursday.
The regular answer to this question by TikTok is no. “TikTok has never shared, or received a request to share, US user data with the Chinese government. Nor would TikTok honor such a request,” Chew will say on Thursday, according to written testimony released by the committee. Indeed, the energy and commerce committee’s press release states that as well as asking Chew about TikTok’s privacy and data security practices, it will ask him about TikTok’s “relationship with the Chinese Communist Party”.
Suspicions about the use of TikTok data, which critics say could be used to create profiles of people of interest like
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