TikTok’s Global Chief Security Officer [CSO] Roland Cloutier will step down from his position to shift into a more strategic advisory role. This change of duty follows concerns about how the company handles US user data. The company previously admitted that employees outside the US were able to access that information, although “cybersecurity controls and authorization” from their US security team were required for anyone to do that. Cloutier will still be an advisor on the business impact of security and trust programs at TikTok. Kim Albarella will now be taking over as the chief of the company’s worldwide security teams on an interim basis.

According to a tick tocks porks person, Cloutier is not overseeing the new team that manages user data in the US anymore. That department reports to Chew [The CEO of ByteDance] directly. Cloutier’s departure wasn’t related to lawmakers’ concerns over U.S. data security, according to the spokesperson, and the shift had been in the works for a couple of months now.

Last month, we were seeing reports that China-based engineers at bite dance, the parent company of TikTok accessed nonpublic data on US TikTok users in multiple locations between at least last September and January. TikTok now says that they are storing all the US user data on Oracle cloud servers located in the US itself. The company also said that they were aiming to remove such private data from their servers and in a letter that they sent to a group of Republican senators this month, cheer wrote that the company is now focused on removing any doubt about the security of US user data. After all, they do not want to get banned in the US like they were in India losing millions of users overnight.