TikTok she’s serious problems and we don’t know how he’s going to get out of this. Yes, it sounds very alarmist but it is not for less. And it is that the government of USA is considering banning the app in the country, a measure that other regions would also take to put a stop to what they would be considering as a security tool. espionage of the Chinese government. This is what is happening and that is the way things are.
An app that the US does not like
The US government has its eye on TikTok and is not going to get off the donkey. Joe Biden, the country’s president, has demanded that the Chinese owners of TikTok sell part of the shares of their app or they will take the decision to ban the social network. In this way, they seek to offer greater diversification to the owners of this solution, created by ByteDancewhich currently accumulates and only in the United States, more than 100 million users.
Although this option had been considered since Donald Trump’s term, the latest reports have ended up fueling a debate that worries the White House a lot. And it is that last summer, the people of BuzzFeed already revealed that TikTok engineers in China were having access to US user data, data that, of course, could be shared with the authorities of the Asian country if required. Not only that. Other independent investigations have also come to warn that the way they collect data is much more “aggressive” than that of other social networks, even allowing access to the phone on which the app is installed.
A problem that, without a doubt, worries the US a lot to the point of launching this new ultimatum to ByteDance. It is not the first measure taken in this regard. The country has already prohibited its legislators from having the application installed on their smartphones beforehand, a decision also taken by the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand (the last to do so), Taiwan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India -one of The countries that had the most users and that currently have completely the application is prohibited even in the app store for the citizen.
The situation in negotiations
ByteDance has not been slow to respond. According to the Chinese company, “if the objective is to protect national security, the division of shares does not solve the problema change in ownership (of the application) would not impose any new restrictions on access or data flow.”
Instead, what the company is going to try to do is come up with some kind of agreement that establishes a protection system for American users that is controlled by third parties.
Some media point out that this week the CEO of TikTok will go to the US in order to find a common point and resolve a matter that could have consequences that, deep down, neither party wants. We will see.
