The US government should force a separation between TikTok Inc. and its parent company over concerns about Chinese government access to US user data, a Republican senator told Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in a letter following testimony from the company’s chief operating officer.
(Bloomberg) — The US government should force a separation between TikTok Inc. and its parent company over concerns about Chinese government access to US user data, a Republican senator told Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in a letter following testimony from the company’s chief operating officer.
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, a member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote to Yellen urging her to require TikTok to cut all ties with Chinese companies and to force Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd. to divest the popular video-sharing app.
Hawley cited testimony to the committee by TikTok Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas in his letter to Yellen, saying Pappas’s acknowledgment that the company’s employees based in China can access US user data demands action.
He said Pappas told the panel last week “that the company has taken no measures to ensure that the employees in China accessing this data are not members of the Chinese Communist Party.”
“The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (Cfius), which you chair, should require TikTok to sever all ties to Chinese companies. TikTok should be entirely divested from ByteDance,” Hawley added in the letter to Yellen.
Cfius, which screens foreign investment in the US for national security concerns, began reviewing the merger of TikTok parent ByteDance and Music.ly during the Trump administration. Attempts to ban the app by former President Donald Trump were unsuccessful and blocked by legal action in some cases. The Biden administration has continued the review, which has stretched for several years, in an effort to address concerns about how the app safeguards US user data.
Pappas told the Senate committee that TikTok was negotiating with federal regulators on restricting access to user data for employees in China but declined to commit to a total cutoff. “Our final agreement to the US government will satisfy all national security concerns,” Pappas testified.
The Treasury Department said Monday evening that Cfius remained committed to its role as a defender of US national security interests, but that it did not comment on deals in the reviewing process.
(Updates with Treasury response, in final paragraph.)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
