The CEO of TikTok will be appearing before Congress this week, and he hopes to reassure them that the information of the app's 150 million users in the United States is secure from Chinese government spying.
Shou Zi Chew, the chief executive of TikTok, will speak before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday and will discuss the barriers that separate the company's operations in the US and China, according to NPR.
TikTok's Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, is bound to Chinese data request rules that require corporations to provide the government with consumer data.
"Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country," TikTok CEO Zi Chew will assert as per a written statement published by the House committee on Tuesday.
Zi Chew will emphasize that over 150 million Americans utilize TikTok each month and that their work is overwhelmingly consumed by TikTok's 1.5 billion users globally, claiming that US content producers on the platform perform better than expected, per CNN.
TikTok Vows User Data Protection
Over a dozen pages long, Chew defends ByteDance's organizational structure and describes actions done and planned to allay concerns that the Chinese government may acquire access to TikTok user information via its possible control over ByteDance.
One such measure is a commitment to protect American user data from "unauthorized foreign access" by constructing a "firewall."
Legislators in the United States are among many who have voiced concerns about the security and privacy of US users of TikTok.
As part of an effort dubbed "Project Texas," TikTok has reportedly spent over $1.5 billion to protect the personal information of its users in the US.
China claims that the US is "suppressing" TikTok and spreading false information about it.
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