Last year, TikTok officials pledged to seal off US user data from China, where parent company ByteDance is based. According to the Wall Street Journal, Project Texas has been in trouble since its inception in 2021. Employees in the unit were reportedly unable to save data to their laptops, preventing any meaningful content analysis. ByteDance’s CEO Shou Zi Chew touted Project Texas in his Congressional Testimony in March 2023 as a voluntary project to assuage concerns about the Chinese government’s involvement in the company. TikTok told the WSJ that it was “voluntarily implementing our plan to protect US user data.”

Source: Wall Street Journal January 31, 2024 17:59 UTC