TikTok, the popular video-sharing social media platform, has recently completed migrating US data to servers owned by tech giant Oracle.

Previously, the data was stored on TikTok’s own servers, based in Virginia, along with Singapore-based backups.

While private data on US users will be deleted, the Virginia and Singapore servers will still be used to backup the data.

“For more than a year, we’ve been working with Oracle on several measures as part of our commercial relationship to better safeguard our app, systems, and the security of US user data,” TikTok said in a statement.

“These changes will enforce additional employee protections, provide more safeguards, and further minimize data transfer outside of the US.”

TikTok is the sixth most popular social media platform, averaging a billion monthly average users. It counts the US as its biggest market.

While the move is obviously a major win for Oracle, which has had its share of the cloud computing market eaten by rivals Amazon and Microsoft, the move is also a milestone for TikTok.

With TikTok at the centre of a long-running controversy over how it utilises the data of its US users, keeping data in the US aims to assuage the concerns of American regulators.

TikTok and the US

The relationship between TikTok and the Chinese Government, along with what it does with its user data, has long been a source of controversy.

Allegations centred around TikTok passing on the personal information of US citizens to the Chinese Communist Party and breaching national security, something the company denied.

Former US President Donald Trump made it a campaign of his, as part of his desire to be seen as tough on China, to ban TikTok or break it off from its China-based parent company, Bytedance.

Under order from a US national security panel, companies were given a deadline to stop doing business with the company, which would have removed it from app stores, or for Bytedance to sell its US operations.

Several companies were in the running to buy TikTok’s American business – Microsoft and Twitter had expressed interest. However, Oracle soon emerged as a frontrunner as part of a consortium with Walmart.

The deal from TikTok to move its operations to Oracle’s server was previously announced during the Trump administration, back in September 2020.

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Trump’s departure from the White House put the planned breakup of TikTok on hold, with new President Joe Biden reversing his executive order. However, there are still regular regulatory concerns over the platform’s data use, which saw the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) launch a fresh investigation into TikTok’s data use.

As part of efforts to assuage these concerns, TikTok has said that it has set up a dedicated US data security (USDS) team. This is designed to ringfence US data away from ByteDance.

However, a recent report from Buzzfeed warned that Bytedance’s Beijing-based employees will still be able to access public data on US users’ videos, comments, and bios.

Based on leaked audio from internal meetings, the report found that non-public data on US users has been repeatedly accessed by Chinese workers between September 2021 and January 2022.

This negates testimony made by a TikTok executive before a US Senate hearing in October where he claimed that a US-based security team decides who accesses the data.

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