The head of public policy for Europe,the middle east and Africa,Theo Bertram said, “it would refuse any request from China to hand over the data.”
The suggestion that we are in any way under the thumb of the Chinese government is completely and utterly false,” he told the BBC.
TikTok has come under pressure by Washington over its future in the US.
Its owner, ByteDance, which is based in Beijing but domiciled in the Cayman Islands, has had talks with the UK government about basing its HQ in London.
But the US is considering banning TikTok and may only allow it to keep operating if it splits from China and becomes an American company.
UK GROWTH
Mike Pompeo (US Secretary of state) has said that Tik tok users are at risk of their data ending up “in the hands of Chinese Communist party”.
In BBC’s today programme Mr Bertram told that tik tok had not made any decisions about where to site its international headquarters, but added:”We are committed to growing further in the UK” and also he added that if Tiktok were approached by the Chinese government,”we would definitely say no to any request for data”.
The Daily Telegraph said it had seen leaked documents showing that users found messaging children in a sexual way had to commit three offences before incurring a permanent ban.
But Mr Bertram said TikTok had changed its policy more than a year ago and that it had “zero tolerance” for such behaviour.
Any posts of that kind would be removed and the perpetrator reported, he said.
The latest development comes as tensions mount between the UK and China over the government’s recent decision to order the removal of Huawei’s 5G equipment from Britain’s mobile networks by 2027.
There are fears it could prompt a economic war between the two countries.
The Chinese ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, told the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday: “We are still evaluating the consequences. This is a very bad decision.”
The Sunday Times reported that a decision by TikTok to build its headquarters in the UK has the potential to create 3,000 jobs.
The Chinese video-sharing platform is hugely popular and the app has been downloaded two billion times.
India has already blocked TikTok as well as other Chinese apps.
