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p>By Echo Wang, David Shepardson

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p>NEW YORK/WASHINGTON on June 17 (Reuters) The company TikTok announced it had completed the process of moving information about its U.S. users to servers at Oracle Corp, in a move that could help address U.S. regulatory concerns over data integrity on the popular short video app.

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p>The decision, which was first reported by Reuters it comes two years after an U.S. national security panel directed parent company ByteDance to end TikTok because of concerns that U.S. user data could be sold to China's communist government.

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p>TikTok is a wildly popular social media app with over 1 billion users around the world. It also lists the U.S. as the largest market.

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p>App developers are being scrutinized more closely by the United States for personal data they manage, particularly when it concerns U.S. intelligence personnel or military personnel.

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p>The order to sell off TikTok was not enforced until Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as U.S. president last year.

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p>However, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has not stopped expressing concerns regarding TikTok's data security that ByteDance is currently trying to address, Reuters previously reported.

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p>The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comments and the U.S. Treasury declined comment.

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p>In March, Reuters reported that TikTok was close to a deal with Oracle Corp to store its U.S. users' information.

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p>Oracle was in talks about the possibility of buying a minority stake TikTok's in 2020. https://www.openlearning.com/u/karlssonaldridge-ri8wso/blog/RemoteSeniorSystemsEngineerAtAutomattic This was when ByteDance was under U.S. attack to sell the application. The cloud computing company now stores all of TikTok's U.S. user data on Oracle data servers in the United States under the new partnership, TikTok said.

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p>Oracle declined to comment.

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p>DATA SECURITY TEAMS

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p>TikTok had previously been storing its U.S. user data at its own data centers in Virginia, with an additional backup in Singapore. It is now deleting private information about U.S. users from its own data centers and rely fully on Oracle's U.S. servers, it said.

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p>According to the company, data is being stored at the Singapore and Virginia centers.

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p>TikTok has also set up an exclusive U.S. data security team known as "USDS" as an intermediary for U.S. user information and ringfencing it from ByteDance an official spokesperson from the company told Reuters.

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p>Andrew Bonillo, an executive in TikTok's global security division, was the leader of the USDS according to a spokesperson.

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p>According to Reuters sources said that the company is currently looking at a structure in which the team will operate on its own and not under TikTok's supervision.

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p>Another senior executive at USDS is Will Farrell, who was previously under TikTok's Chief Security Officer Roland Cloutier. The USDS team comprises content moderation personnel, engineers, and members from product and user operations.

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p>ByteDance is among the fastest-growing startups in China. It owns the country's leading news aggregater, Jinri Toutiao, as along with TikTok's Chinese counterpart Douyin.

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p>In June 2021, Biden withdrew Trump-era executive orders that sought to prohibit new downloads of WeChat and TikTok. The Commerce Department is currently writing new rules on app security of data. This could lead to restrictions on how apps that are located outside the United States can access U.S. data or to ban apps that pose security risks.

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p>Gina Raimondo, Commerce Secretary, stated last year that the administration is "very serious" about protecting Americans their data. However, she criticised Trump's strategy.

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p>"Doing an executive order that's useless on TikTok isn't the way to go," she said. (Reporting by Echo Wang in New York, David Shepardson in Washington and editing by Deepa Babington)

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