Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is demanding that the Pentagon release information about its contract with a Chinese-owned tutoring company that has access to U.S. military family records.
Tutor.com, a popular tutoring website, is owned by Primavera Holdings Limited, a company run by Chinese nationals that also has stakes in TikTok parent company ByteDance and e-commerce giant Alibaba.
The site provides tutoring services to the U.S. military and school districts across the country.
However, Cotton said a Chinese company should not have access to the sensitive data of American schoolchildren and military families.
“The Department of Defense must explain why a Chinese company can easily access the data for the military families,” Cotton told DailyMail.com in a statement.
“The same goes for any school district that uses tutor.com.”
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., sent a letter to the Pentagon demanding further details about his contract with Tutor.com
Tutor.com offers kindergarten tutoring services through postgraduate students
At the bottom of the Tutor.com website is a disclosure that the company is owned by Chinese nationals who work for Primavera Holdings Limited, a company based in Hong Kong, China
Cotton originally sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in February asking for more information about the Pentagon’s deal with Tutor.com.
In his letter, he called the Pentagon’s business relationship with Primavera “ill-considered” and “reckless.”
The Chinese Communist Party is known to control major companies with national security implications, such as TikTok, and Cotton is concerned that the same applies to Primavera.
“In the course of providing educational services, Tutor.com collects personal information about users, such as location, Internet Protocol addresses, and content of the tutoring sessions,” Cotton wrote in the February letter.
“Since China’s national security laws require companies to release confidential corporate and customer data to the Chinese government, we are paying to expose the private information of our military and their children to the Chinese Communist Party.”
Tutor.com, meanwhile, fought back against Cotton’s claims in a statement shared with DailyMail.com.
‘Tutor.com is a US company and we comply with US state and federal laws. We were incorporated in the state of Delaware in 2000. Our primary location is New York City, and all student data is stored in the United States,” a Tutor.com spokesperson said.
Primavera Holdings Limited acquired The Princeton Review, owner of Tutor.com, in 2022
Tutor.com offers “free, online tutoring and homework help” for U.S. military members
“As a US company, Tutor.com cannot be forced to release personal information to China,” the company continued.
“No student or family personal information is shared with Primavera, and Primavera does not have – and may not be given – access to our IT systems.”
Notably, Tutor.com made no mention of the data protection practices used for US military personnel.
Despite the company’s confirmation that user data is not stored in or accessed by individuals in China, national security concerns arising from Chinese-owned companies on Capitol Hill have seemingly reached an all-time high.
On Wednesday morning, the House of Representatives passed a bill that could ban the popular social media app TikTok from Chinese parent company ByteDance, in which Primavera has also invested.
The bill was passed by an overwhelming majority of 352 votes to 65.
A group of Democrats and Republicans have been working on the bill for more than a year, and if it passes the Senate, President Joe Biden has said he would sign it into law.
The House China Select Committee says Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials through ByteDance are using TikTok to spy on the locations of its American users and dictate its algorithm to carry out influence campaigns, making it a national security threat.