TikTok says its American traffic is going through Oracle servers, but it retains backups.

TikTok, the Chinese-owned video clip app, claimed on Friday that it was transferring all of the knowledge generated by its American people by way of servers controlled by Oracle, the Silicon Valley business, in a bid to encourage the U.S. federal government that it will not expose the individual details of Us citizens to the Chinese government.

But TikTok added that it would however keep its own backups of that information, probably complicating those efforts.

The app, which is owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance, mentioned in a weblog article that it envisioned to finally delete American users’ “private knowledge from our have knowledge facilities and entirely pivot to Oracle cloud servers located” in the United States. It did not say when that would get position.

“For much more than a 12 months, we have been doing work with Oracle on numerous steps as section of our business marriage to better safeguard our application, programs, and the stability of U.S. person information,” Albert Calamug, who functions for TikTok’s public coverage division, reported in the submit.

The video application made its announcement before BuzzFeed Information published an short article detailing how TikTok personnel felt it was challenging to successfully wall off its information from China. In accordance to recordings the information outlet reported it experienced obtained, TikTok staff members reported Chinese engineers had obtain to American data as not too long ago as this 12 months.

“As we have publicly stated, we’ve introduced in world class internal and external safety specialists to help us bolster our facts safety efforts,” TikTok said in a statement. The company added that it had produced a unit in May well, led from the United States, to “provide a greater degree of target and governance” on Americans’ information protection.

In 2020, President Donald J. Trump requested ByteDance to market TikTok over concerns it could expose the personalized information of Us citizens to Beijing. Though the White Household was reported to have attained a deal to sell part of the app to Oracle and other people, it hardly ever came to fruition. The Biden administration has ongoing scrutinizing TikTok and other alternatives for Chinese firms to command American data.

A White Household spokeswoman did not answer to a request for remark. A spokesman for the Treasury Department, which is a member of the committee that vets international expense in the United States, declined to comment. Oracle also declined to remark.