According to Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, the Chinese tutoring company Tutor.com has infiltrated homes and classrooms of US military bases.
Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, requests that the Pentagon provide details on its agreement with a Chinese-owned tutoring business with access to personal information about American military families.
The well-known tuition website Tutor.com is owned by Primavera Holdings Limited. This Chinese-owned corporation also has interests in the parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, and the e-commerce behemoth Alibaba.
The website provides teaching services to school systems across the nation as well as the US military.
According to the indictment, a federal grand jury in San Francisco has arrested Linwei Ding, a Chinese national and Google engineer, for stealing AI secrets for China.
However, according to Cotton, a Chinese-owned business shouldn’t have access to the private information of American schoolchildren and military families.
Cotton said in a statement, “The Department of Defense needs to explain why a Chinese-owned company has easy access to the data for the military families.”
“The same goes for any school district that is utilizing tutor.com.”
In February, Cotton had first written to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to inquire about further details on the Pentagon’s agreement with Tutor.com.
He referred to the Pentagon’s economic partnership with Primavera as “ill-advised” and “reckless” in his letter.
Cotton worries that Primavera is under the Chinese Communist Party’s influence, as is the case with TikTok and other sizable companies that have an impact on national security.
In the February letter, Cotton stated, “While providing educational services, Tutor.com collects personal data on users, such as location, internet protocol addresses, and contents of the tutoring sessions.”
“As Chinese national security laws require companies to release confidential business and customer data to the Chinese government, we are paying to expose our military and their children’s private information to the Chinese Communist Party.”
In the meantime, Tutor.com disputed Cotton’s assertions in a released statement.
“Tutor.com is an American company, and we abide by U.S. state and federal laws. We were incorporated in 2000 in the state of Delaware. Our principal place of business is New York City, and all student data is housed in the United States,” a Tutor.com spokesperson said.
“As an American company, Tutor.com cannot be compelled to release personal data to China,” the company continued.
“No personal information of students or families is shared with Primavera, and Primavera does not have—and may not obtain—access to our IT systems.”
Notably, Tutor.com made no mention of the data privacy procedures applied to US military members.
The corporation has confirmed that customer data is neither kept in China nor made available to anyone there, but national security worries on Capitol Hill over Chinese-owned businesses appear to be at an all-time high.
A bill that would outlaw the famous social networking app TikTok from its Chinese parent company ByteDance—in which Primavera has also invested—was voted by the House on Wednesday morning.
By an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 352 to 65, the bill was passed.
The bill was developed over a year by a team of Republicans and Democrats, and President Joe Biden has promised to sign it into law if it makes it through the Senate.
TikTok poses a national security threat, according to the House China Select Committee, because Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials are utilizing ByteDance to utilize the app to spy on the whereabouts of its users in the United States and control its algorithm for influence efforts.
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