The White House has promised that all US user data on TikTok will be stored on Oracle servers in the United States, according to a deal to be announced later this week.
Speaking to reporters last night, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also said that Oracle would protect the data from surveillance or interference by foreign adversaries.
Meanwhile, TikTok’s algorithm would be retrained and operated in the United States, she said.
“Tiktok will be owned by a majority of American investors and controlled by a board of directors with extensive national security and cybersecurity credentials. In partnership with the US government, Oracle will serve as Tiktok trusted security provider, and they will independently monitor the safety and data security of all US user data on Tiktok platform. Americans’ data will be stored securely in the United States without access from China. All US user data will be stored on servers operated by Oracle in the United States, protected from surveillance or interference by foreign adversaries,” she said.
The deal for Tiktok ownership will likely extend a relationship with Oracle which has seen Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) hosting all traffic to the social network from within the USA.
In June 2022, a statement from TikTok said, “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. We still use our US and Singapore datacenters for backup, but as we continue our work we expect to delete US users’ private data from our own datacenters and fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers located in the US.”
On Sunday, US President Donald Trump told Fox News that PC manufacturing pioneer Michael Dell would likely be involved and that Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison was one of a group bidding to acquire TikTok USA. The US press secretary confirmed the USA and China have finalized a deal to sell the app and that the deal will see the app’s famously addictive algorithm held by American interests.
In yesterday’s press briefing, Leavitt would not disclose the value of the agreement but promised businesses using Tiktok would generate as much as $178 billion in economic activity within the US over the next four years.
She said Tiktok would remain globally interoperable, and allow Tiktok users in the US to see videos posted by users in other countries and vice versa. ®