Thousands of TikTok personnel have been scrambling over the last year to shift the company’s storage of information about its US customers to data centers in the US, and to block access to that data elsewhere. Internally, the effort is referred to as “Project Texas.” According to seven current and former TikTok employees, the move is in reaction to regulators’ concerns that the Chinese government could exploit the app, which is controlled by the Chinese corporation ByteDance, to get sensitive information about US individuals.
The building of US-specific clones of TikTok’s core systems has been at the heart of Project Texas.
Some of these systems are tracking and analytics tools, such as those used by staff to monitor content virality, while others, such as the recommendation algorithm that drives TikTok’s popular “For You” page, have an impact on what viewers see. The new US-specific infrastructure, as well as all US user data, would be hosted in Oracle data centres, TikTok’s “trusted technology partner.” (The project’s name alludes to Oracle’s Austin headquarters.) New limitations will limit system access to a new US-based team dubbed US Tech Services (USTS). TikTok intends to replicate Project Texas across Europe once it is completed.
One crucial aspect of Project Texas has yet to be determined: how much control Beijing will have over the USTS squad. Employees at USTS now report to middle managers in the United States, who report to a ByteDance executive in China. According to two people familiar with the discussions, the business is discussing legal models to limit Chinese managers’ access to USTS information.
TikTok declined to respond to a thorough series of questions concerning Project Texas from BuzzFeed News. Instead, company spokesperson Maureen Shanahan issued the following statement: “TikTok is devoted to preserving our community’s privacy and security.”
User data is housed in data centres in the United States and Singapore, and we continue to invest in data security as part of our broader efforts to protect our users and their information.”
Shanahan declined to comment on TikTok’s conversations about establishing a separate data governance company, as well as the USTS team reporting to a ByteDance employee.
Project Texas arrives at a pivotal juncture in TikTok’s brief career. TikTok became the most-visited website in the world in 2021, surpassing YouTube in US view time and Facebook in-app downloads for the first time. (Full disclosure: I formerly worked in policy at Facebook and Spotify.)
“This is a corporation that is looking for a method to make this work,” he explained. “They’ll keep trying until they’re clearly defeated since the money on the table is immense.”
