TikTok CEO Shaw Ji Chu told US lawmakers that Chinese employees of parent company ByteDance may still have access to some of the app’s US data, but added that this will no longer be the case when a mitigation plan called Project Texas is completed. , reports CNBC.

The information is important because it gets to the heart of US officials’ concerns about TikTok’s ownership and shows how difficult and time-consuming it can be to separate the app from its Chinese parent company.

Lawmakers and intelligence officials fear that US user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government through ByteDance.

This is because Chinese law allows the government to obtain confidential information from companies for alleged national security purposes.

During Chu’s much-anticipated hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Bob Latta, R-Ohio, asked Chu whether any ByteDance employees in China could now access US data.

“After the completion of the Texas project, the answer is no. Today, there is still some data that we need to delete,” Chew said.

Later in the hearing, in an exchange with Congressman Tim Wahlberg, R-Michigan, Chew denied giving US data to the Chinese Communist Party, saying that TikTok is a “private business” that, like many others, is based on a “global workforce.”

Asked for comment last week about a Wall Street Journal article suggesting that TikTok was a Chinese spy operation, a TikTok spokesperson said there was “no truth” to the allegations.

At the time, the spokesperson added that “as of October 2022, all new user data in the US is stored exclusively in Oracle’s cloud system, with the data completely protected from any foreign government.”

This data is processed exclusively by US Data Security – a US-owned and controlled subsidiary of TikTok – whose sole purpose is to protect US national security interests by protecting US user data and preventing external manipulation of our systems.”

On Thursday, TikTok said that Project Texas is already in development, but many steps need to be taken to complete it. This includes deleting data from TikTok’s servers in Singapore and Virginia, a process that began last week.

The data on these servers is of the type that ByteDance employees in China can theoretically access for now. Once the data is removed, according to TikTok, those employees will no longer have access to US user data from the app.