TikTok Executive Rebuts U.S. Accusations That App Shares Info

What’s new: A TikTok Inc. executive has denied U.S. accusations that the popular video app shares information with its Beijing-based parent company and has ties to the Chinese government.

The app does not share infrastructure with its parent company ByteDance Ltd. and does not share user data with its Chinese version, Douyin, TikTok’s Chief Information Security Officer Roland Cloutier said in a letter dated Oct. 14, ahead of an upcoming hearing in U.S. federal court.

He said that U.S. government’s accusations against TikTok “are not accurate.”

“Although some of the same underlying ByteDance technology is used for multiple ByteDance products, that does not mean that those products share the same infrastructure,” Cloutier said in the letter.

The initial designs of the core recommendation-generating algorithms in TikTok and Douyin were independently produced by two separate developing teams, a technical officer at TikTok told Caixin on Saturday.

What’s the background: TikTok was granted a last-minute reprieve from U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order banning its operation within the country after a federal judge last month temporarily blocked the ban from taking effect.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols said in his ruling that the U.S. government most likely overstepped its authority. Trump signed executive orders banning TikTok and the Chinese-owned social messaging app WeChat from the U.S. over alleged national security concerns.

Contact reporter Anniek Bao (yunxinbao@caixin.com) and editor Michael Bellart (michaelbellart@caixin.com)

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