Head of Canada’s intelligence agency says Chinese government can access TikTok user data

Canada’s law enforcement agency is trying to dissuade Canadians from using TikTok by telling users that their data is “available to the government of China.”

In an interview with CBC News airing Saturday, David Vigneault, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said that “there is a very clear strategy on the part of the government of China… to be able to acquire… personal information from around the world,” the CBC reports.

“They are using big data analytics, they have incredible computer farms processing the data, they are developing artificial intelligence… based on the use of that data,” Vigneault added.

The Chinese government’s ability to access user data is at the forefront of U.S. efforts to regulate — and potentially even ban — the app. Congress passed a bill that would ban TikTok unless it divested from its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, in April. TikTok sued the US government over the law in May, arguing that the impending ban is unconstitutional.

TikTok previously claimed that employees in China are unable to access US and European users’ data. The company has undertaken two major corporate restructuring efforts – Project Texas and Project Clover, referring to efforts in the US and Europe, respectively – to isolate user data in China. US user data is hosted on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure and should not be accessible to anyone outside the US, although a recent report from Fortune suggests that efforts to protect US users’ data have been “largely cosmetic.”

“These claims are not supported by evidence, and the fact is that TikTok has never shared Canadian user data with the Chinese government, nor would we if asked,” said TikTok spokeswoman Danielle Morgan. On the edge.