TikTok Plans to Keep Your Data Safe With a 'Massive Amount of Oversight'

pcmag.com:

With a non-trivial segment of Washington legislators unwilling to trust TikTok, the social network’s interim US security head gave a talk there Monday about how the American subsidiary of the Chinese firm ByteDance will subject itself to a trust-no-one level of scrutiny.

"The goal here is to have a massive amount of oversight, so you don't have to take our word for it,” Will Farrell, interim security officer at TikTok US, said in a keynote at the State of the Net tech-policy conference.(Opens in a new window) 

Over a quick 15 minutes—a compressed presentation that Farrell called "a bit of a motorcycle ride through an art museum"—he ushered attendees through "Project Texas(Opens in a new window)," TikTok’s attempt with its US partner Oracle to firewall its code and data against interference from the Chinese government or anybody else.

The first of five pillars begins with a new governing entity in the US branch of TikTok’s organizational chart: TikTok US Data Security(Opens in a new window). It will be run by "a completely independent board," Farell says, consisting of three people with no prior affiliation with TikTok or ByteDance. They must have a fiduciary responsibility to the US government and be approved by the US government. 

“This goes beyond what any tech company is going today,” according to Farrell, who notes that the feds could effectively fire him if they were not comfortable with his work. “It's much closer to government contractors.” 

The second pillar consists of a series of technological controls to lock in TikTok’s US operations against possible snooping from overseas. “We've taken everything that is TikTok, isolated it and replicated it in the Oracle cloud,” he says, adding that its mobile app will