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TikTok’s Chinese language guardian ByteDance had its greatest lobbying quarter ever, spending greater than $2.1 million in the second one quarter to foyer the U.S. govt, in line with its disclosure filed Wednesday in a federal database.
That represents a 130% building up from ByteDance’s spending the former quarter and marks the primary time it is crowned $2 million in one quarter because it first registered lobbying disclosures in 2019. The corporate spent about $4.7 million on lobbying in all of 2021, in line with the disclosures.
The corporate lobbied on a number of problems. One piece of regulation it mentioned was once the American Innovation and Selection On-line Act, the important thing antitrust invoice that might restrict dominant tech platforms from favoring their very own choices over the ones of competitors that depend on their products and services. It additionally lobbied at the two variations of a big investment invoice aimed toward boosting American competitiveness towards China, a handful of on-line privateness expenses, a protection spending invoice and a invoice to prohibit TikTok from Division of Place of birth Safety gadgets.
ByteDance engaged with each chambers of Congress all the way through the quarter in addition to government companies together with the departments of Trade, Protection, State and the Government Place of work of the President, in line with the submitting.
The lobbying disclosures do not elaborate on what precisely ByteDance was once pushing for and each the guardian corporate and TikTok didn’t right away reply to CNBC’s requests for remark.
TikTok’s Chinese language possession has sophisticated its courting with Washington as many lawmakers are skeptical about how protected it could stay U.S. consumer information whilst believing that Beijing may just compel ByteDance at hand over data.
TikTok has stated it does now not retailer U.S. consumer information in China and that it might now not surrender such data to the Chinese language govt. However lawmaker skepticism has continued and was once lately reignited through a BuzzFeed Information document that discovered Chinese language-based ByteDance workers have been in a position to get right of entry to nonpublic U.S. consumer information. A TikTok spokesperson instructed BuzzFeed on the time it ceaselessly works to validate its safety requirements together with via unbiased third-party exams.
In a while ahead of that article was once revealed remaining month, TikTok launched a weblog put up saying that via its partnership with Oracle, it is “modified the default garage location of US consumer information” in order that “100% of US consumer visitors is being routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.”
“We nonetheless use our U.S. and Singapore information facilities for backup, however as we proceed our paintings we predict to delete U.S. customers’ non-public information from our personal information facilities and completely pivot to Oracle cloud servers positioned within the U.S.,” the corporate added.
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