Report: TikTok’s efforts to silo US data are ‘largely cosmetic’

By Gaby Del Valle , a policy reporter. Her past work has focused on immigration politics, border surveillance technologies, and the rise of the New Right.

Since 2022, TikTok has undertaken a massive, expensive effort to silo off its US operations — and American users’ data — from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. TikTok has described the corporate restructuring, which it dubbed Project Texas, as “an unprecedented initiative dedicated to making every American on TikTok feel safe, with confidence that their data is secure and the platform is free from outside influence.” Several former employees, however, told Fortune that Project Texas is instead “largely cosmetic” and that they and their colleagues continued to work closely with Beijing-based ByteDance executives after the plan’s implementation.

One major aspect of Project Texas — so named because Oracle, TikTok’s “technology partner,” is headquartered in Austin — was transferring all US user data over to Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. (Per Texas Monthly, none of Oracle’s cloud data servers are actually in the state.) Under Project Texas’ terms, Americans’ data isn’t supposed to leave the US at all, nor can it be accessed by ByteDance employees in China. 

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