TikTok says its American visitors goes by Oracle servers, nevertheless it retains backups.

TikTok, the Chinese language-owned video app, stated on Friday that it was shifting all the knowledge produced by its American customers by servers managed by Oracle, the Silicon Valley firm, in a bid to persuade the U.S. authorities that it’ll not expose the non-public data of People to the Chinese language authorities.

However TikTok added that it could nonetheless retailer its personal backups of that data, probably complicating these efforts.

The app, which is owned by the Chinese language firm ByteDance, stated in a blog post that it anticipated to finally delete American customers’ “personal knowledge from our personal knowledge facilities and totally pivot to Oracle cloud servers positioned” in america. It didn’t say when that may happen.

“For greater than a 12 months, we’ve been working with Oracle on a number of measures as a part of our industrial relationship to higher safeguard our app, methods, and the safety of U.S. consumer knowledge,” Albert Calamug, who works for TikTok’s public coverage division, stated within the publish.

The video app made its announcement earlier than BuzzFeed Information published an article detailing how TikTok staff felt it was troublesome to efficiently wall off its knowledge from China. Based on recordings the information outlet stated it had obtained, TikTok staff stated Chinese language engineers had entry to American knowledge as lately as this 12 months.

“As we’ve publicly said, we’ve introduced in world class inside and exterior safety specialists to assist us strengthen our knowledge safety efforts,” TikTok stated in an announcement. The corporate added that it had created a unit in Could, led from america, to “present a better stage of focus and governance” on People’ knowledge safety.

In 2020, President Donald J. Trump ordered ByteDance to promote TikTok over issues it may expose the non-public data of People to Beijing. Whereas the White Home was said to have reached a deal to promote a part of the app to Oracle and others, it by no means got here to fruition. The Biden administration has continued scrutinizing TikTok and different alternatives for Chinese language corporations to manage American knowledge.

A White Home spokeswoman didn’t reply to a request for remark. A spokesman for the Treasury Division, which is a member of the committee that vets overseas funding in america, declined to remark. Oracle additionally declined to remark.