Amber Neely
Plans to force the sale of TikTok's American operation to Walmart Inc. and Oracle Corp. seems unlikely to happen, as President Biden reviews the app's risk to national security.
The Biden administration has begun looking into President Trump's long-waged war against the popular video app, TikTok. Currently, there are no concrete plans for resolving issues that the previous administration deemed dire.
"We plan to develop a comprehensive approach to securing U.S. data that addresses the full range of threats we face," National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne said, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. "This includes the risk posed by Chinese apps and other software that operate in the U.S. In the coming months, we expect to review specific cases in light of a comprehensive understanding of the risks we face."
Trump had long rallied against TikTok's parent company, China-based ByteDance, stating that the popular video app was a threat to American Data.
ByteDance has reiterated that the Chinese government has no access to American users' data, despite The Trump administration's allegations.
Trump's solution was to push ByteDance into selling its American operations to a U.S.-owned entity, such as Walmart, Oracle, or Microsoft, or ban the service within the U.S.
Despite the Trump administration's efforts to force the sale by September 20, 2020, the ban deadline was pushed back multiple times.
In November, the U.S. Commerce Department that it wouldn't enforce an order to shut down TikTok, and ultimately the ban never went into effect.
In December, it was reported that TikTok would not be given a new deadline or be banned, but instead, the situation would be maintained. The limbo would continue while TikTok talks to the U.S. government about a sale that would satisfy the Trump administration's concerns.
The Trump administration made one final effort in December to appeal U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols injunction that prohibited the Department of Commerce from imposing rules which restrict internet carriers from handling the social media service's data.
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
Malcolm Owen
7 Comments
What "threat to American data" could it be? Doesn't iOS basically keep apps from reading other apps' data? The only things it would be able to "steal" are videos that people actually post.
Given how trustworthy Walmart, Oracle, and Microsloth are, we're better off with ByteDance.
Actually the ByteDance Trump spat was always more likely related to his embarrassment at the hands of TikTok users and the theoretical than any real data privacy issue. I suspect FaceBooks exploitation of American data is much much worse, this decision of putting the issue in more context makes sense.
No American company was ever going to have to buy TikTok and the company was never in danger of being banned imo. What we witnessed was an example of a toddler being told "in a minute" until they finally fell asleep, or in the case of Trump, the inevitable loss of the election. Petulant man-baby failed to exact petty revenge on the TikTok kids that dunked on him at his rally.