Reportedly, officials with TikTok have finally disclosed the details of the negotiations that have been taking place with U.S. legislators as part of a $1.5 billion plan which would seek to put emphasis on transparency and entirely reorganize how it works within the U.S. because of extreme national security concerns regarding the Chinese-based social media titan.
Talks between the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment, which is tasked with watching how TikTok would operate inside of America, and the giant video-sharing app has until recently been kept confidential, explained a report from The Wall Streer Journal, as the list of states that have put in place heavy restrictions on bans targeting the app in regard to any government-owned devices over data privacy and national security threats has spiked to 25 states.
Officials with the social media platform stated to The Wall Street Journal that the company thinks that the newest iteration of the proposal would finally deal with the security concerns, which includes “content recommendation and user-data access with layers of government and independent oversight.”
“We are not waiting for an agreement to be in place,” explained one spokeswoman. “We’ve made substantial progress on implementing that solution over the past year and look forward to completing that work to put these concerns to rest.”
Ever-rising concerns about security due to the social media platform have ended up in the direct spotlight of attention for legislators recently in the wake of the Federal Communications Commission stating that it could not efficiently regulate the massive social media app or even try to control the massive amount of American data being gathered from making its way back to Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has mandated by the country’s 2017 National Intelligence Law that all companies must share all data gathered.
“It is becoming more and more untenable for a company to comply with American laws and also comply with Chinese laws,” expressed one senior adviser at the Stanford University Center on Geopolitics and Technology, Jacob Helberg, to the outlet.
ByteDance, as the owner of the TikTok platform, was accused last year of actively tracking a number of reporters from Forbes as part of a covert surveillance campaign, which ended up allowing employees to gain access to personal information such as the IP addresses of some TikTok users connected to the journalists.
It was reported by Forbes that the Internal Audit and Risk Control department for ByteDance was the one responsible for the plan to watch the locations of specific American citizens.