Would you prefer TikTok to be owned by Byte Dance, a Chinese company, or Elon Musk?

For two years, TikTok has been in confidential talks with the administration’s review panel, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, to address questions about ByteDance’s relationship with the Chinese government and whether that link could put the sensitive data of 100 million U.S. users into the hands of Beijing officials. The company assumed that those talks would reach a resolution soon after it submitted a 90-page proposal to the administration in August.
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Under the proposal, called Project Texas, TikTok would remain owned by ByteDance. But it would take a number of steps that it said would prevent the Chinese government from having access to data on U.S. users and offer the U.S. government oversight of the platform. Some of those steps have been put in place since October.

The company has proposed putting all U.S. user data into domestic servers owned and operated by Oracle, the American software giant. The data would not be allowed to be transferred outside the United States, nor would it be accessible to ByteDance or TikTok employees outside the country.

The program proposes having CFIUS conduct regular audits of the new data system and creating a new unit, TikTok U.S. Data Security, with 2,500 engineers, security experts, and trust and safety officials, all based in the United States, who have access to TikTok’s U.S. user data for business functions. The unit would report to a three-member board assigned by CFIUS. In addition, TikTok’s source code, which offers insight into why certain videos are shown in users’ feeds, would be reviewed by Oracle and a third-party inspector.