Democratic Senator Ed Markey has asked a TikTok US joint venture and Oracle to respond to questions on the security of data from American users of the short video platform and steps to block foreign interference in its content recommendation algorithm. ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, completed a deal in January to create a majority American-owned venture that will protect US data and prevent a potential ban on the app, which has more than 200 million American users. Oracle, a leading cloud services company, is one of the venture’s three managing investors. The venture will retrain, test and update the recommendation algorithm using US user data, with the system hosted in Oracle’s American cloud.
