SAULSALITO (US): Under intense scrutiny from Washington that could lead to a potential ban, the top attorney for TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance defended the social media platform’s plan to safeguard US user data from China.

“The basic approach that we’re following is to make it physically impossible for any government, including the Chinese government, to get access to US user data,” said general counsel Erich Andersen during a wide-ranging interview at a cybersecurity conference in Sausalito, California.

ByteDance will continue to develop its new app called Lemon8, Andersen said.

“We’re obviously going to do our best with the Lemon8 app to comply with US law and to make sure we do the right thing here,” he said, referring to the new social app developed by ByteDance. “But I think we got a long way to go with that application — it’s pretty much a startup phase.”

ByteDance’s most known app, TikTok, is under intense scrutiny over concerns it could hand over user data to the Chinese government or push pro-Beijing propaganda and misinformation on its behalf. Lemon8 was introduced across app stores in Japan in April 2020 and has been rolled out in more countries since then. It’s available for download in the US and could face similar scrutiny to TikTok.

Leaders at the FBI, CIA and officials at other government agencies have warned that ByteDance could be forced to give user data to Beijing under a 2017 China’s national security law

To assuage concerns from US officials, TikTok has been emphasizing Project Texas proposal, to store US user data on servers owned and maintained by the software giant Oracle.