Shanahan declined to comment on TikTok’s discussions about creating a separate data governance entity, and on the fact that the USTS team reports to a ByteDance employee.
User data is stored in data centers in the US and Singapore, and we continue to invest in data security as part of our overall work to keep our users and their information safe.” Company spokesperson Maureen Shanahan instead offered a statement: “TikTok is committed to protecting the privacy and security of our community. TikTok declined to answer a detailed set of questions from BuzzFeed News about Project Texas. But the company is discussing legal models to restrict Chinese managers’ access to USTS information, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
Today, USTS employees report to middle managers in the United States, who report to a ByteDance executive in China. One critical part of Project Texas has not yet been decided: how much control Beijing will have over the USTS team. Once Project Texas is complete, TikTok plans to replicate it in Europe. The new US-specific systems, including all US user data, will be hosted in data centers owned by Oracle, TikTok’s “ trusted technology partner.” (The project name is a nod to Oracle’s headquarters in Austin.) New controls will restrict access to the systems to a new US-based team, called US Tech Services (USTS). Some of these systems are tracking and analytics tools, like the ones that employees use to monitor content virality, while others affect what users see, like the recommendation algorithm that powers TikTok’s popular “For You” page. The heart of Project Texas has been the creation of US-specific clones of TikTok’s internal systems. The effort, which is ongoing, is known internally as “Project Texas.” According to seven current and former TikTok employees, it represents the company’s response to concerns from regulators that the Chinese government could use the app, owned by the Chinese corporation ByteDance, to access sensitive information about US citizens. Over the past year, thousands of TikTok employees have scrambled to move the company’s stores of information about its US users to data centers inside the US, and to restrict access to that data abroad.
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