After a year of silence, there would still be an agreement between TikTok and Oracle to transfer the data of American users to the latter.
According to Reuters, the two companies are close to a deal under which the user data of American TikTok users in the US will be kept on Oracle servers, strictly shielded from TikTok’s Chinese parent company Bytedance.
That (yet to be announced) deal is remarkable but not unexpected. The two have been looking at a possible partnership under light coercion from the US government since 2020. He gave the order a year and a half ago to divest TikTok if the company wanted to remain active in the US. The fear is that otherwise, user data would fall into the hands of the Chinese government.
But the US experienced a power change shortly afterwards, and under President Biden, that order was not ratified, although concerns persisted and ByteDance still had to find a solution.
At the time, Oracle was already a candidate to take over the app, or at least the American activities, and that would now partly be the case. This would also outperform Alphabet because today, some of the company’s data is already running on Google Cloud.
Reuters says the deal will also set up a “hundreds of people” data management team to monitor the ports between Bytedance and US data. A scheme is being sought in which those people are not under the supervision of TikTok.
