TikTok attorney: China can't get U.S. data under plan

Under intense scrutiny from Washington that could lead to a potential ban, the top attorney for TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance defended the social media platform's plan to safeguard U.S. user data from China.

Under intense scrutiny from Washington that could lead to a potential ban, the top attorney for TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance defended the social media platform's plan to safeguard U.S. user data from China.

"The basic approach that we're following is to make it physically impossible for any government, including the Chinese government, to get access to U.S. user data," said general counsel Erich Anderson during a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press at a cybersecurity conference in Sausalito, California on Friday sponsored by Hewlett-Packard Foundation and Aspen Digital and featuring top government officials, tech executives and journalists.

Anderson also said ByteDance will continue to develop its new app called Lemon8.

"We're obviously going to do our best with the Lemon8 app to comply with U.S. law and to make sure we do the right thing here," Anderson said, referring to the new social app developed by ByteDance that resembles Instagram and Pinterest. "But I think we got a long way to go with that application -- it's pretty much a startup phase."

ByteDance's most known app, TikTok, is under intense scrutiny over concerns it could hand over user data to the Chinese government or push pro-Beijing propaganda and misinformation on its behalf. Lemon8 was introduced across app stores in Japan in April 2020 and has been rolled out in more countries since then. It's available for download in the U.S. and could face similar scrutiny to TikTok.

Leaders at the FBI, CIA and officials at other government agencies have warned that ByteDance could be forced to give user data -- such as browsing history, IP addresses and biometric identifiers -- to Beijing under a 2017 law that compels companies to cooperate with the government for matters involving China's national security. Another Chinese law, implemented in 2014, has similar mandates.

To assuage concerns from U.S. officials, TikTok has been emphasizing a $1.5 billion proposal, called Project Texas, to store all U.S. user data on servers owned and maintained by the software giant Oracle. Under the plan, access to U.S. data would be managed by U.S. employees through a separate entity called TikTok U.S. Data Security, which is run independently of ByteDance and monitored by outside observers.