China’s TikTok Fails to Live Up to Promise on Protecting Data of U.S. Users

China’s TikTok said it has spent $1.5 billion developing an operation meant to convince U.S. lawmakers that it is safe for Americans to use the app. The company’s executives have also promised to wall-off U.S. user data and bring in engineers and third parties to verify the algorithm functions without interference from the Chinese Communist regime. TikTok, however, has so far failed to live up to its promises.

TikTok launched “Project Texas” in order to appease U.S. lawmakers concerned with the Chinese app’s connection to the Chinese Communist Party. Project Texas reportedly began in 2021. The operation says it walled off U.S. user data from China in early 2023.

Project Texas is meant to oversee U.S. user data and content recommendations on TikTok, but its managers have sometimes told employees to share with colleagues in other parts of the company, as well as with employees of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, according to current and former employees and internal documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal.

Moreover, this has reportedly been done without going through official channels, and the U.S. user data has been known to include private information such as a person’s email, birth date, and IP address.

Meanwhile, ByteDance workers living under the Chinese Communist Party update update TikTok’s algorithm so often that Project Texas employees find it difficult to keep up with the changes, and worry that they won’t catch potential problems, sources told WSJ.

While the Chinese app has promised to give Project Texas employees laptops and software that is not owned by ByteDance, a lot of these devices are taking too long to arrive, leaving workers with only their ByteDance-owned devices.

Project Texas leaders told employees in December that they planned to roll out new tools for sharing data and communicating with co-workers, according to a memo obtained by WSJ.

The operation has shown itself to be a challenging endeavor, as the Chinese app needs to separate U.S. user data from the rest of the company so that the data and content recommendations live outside the reach of the Chinese Communist regime.

Project Texas employees were instructed to review TikTok’s code for signs of Chinese interference before allowing updates, which reportedly resulted in them finding a slew of code every morning awaiting verification, presumably completed in China.

While facing pressure to work fast, Project Texas employees found the task virtually impossible without additional staff, sources told WSJ. Meanwhile, TikTok’s algorithm is incorporating a ever-increasing number of updates that the Project Texas team hasn’t been able to inspect.

A TikTok spokesperson, meanwhile, told WSJ that the app’s U.S. algorithm is stored with its American partner, Oracle, which is based in Texas. The Chinese app says Oracle is monitoring all the data that leaves Project Texas, and checks every line of code in the app’s algorithm for suspicious changes.

But Oracle doesn’t monitor the data that TikTok employees share with each other over the Chinese company’s internal messaging tools, sources say.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.