The United States plan to force the sale of TikTok’s American operations to American corporations has been shelved indefinitely, WSJ reports.
This is thanks to President Biden’s undertaking to review Trump’s efforts to address potential security risks from the popular Chinese tech company.
Apparently discussions have been ongoing between ByteDance (TikTok’s mother ship) and the US national security officials. The discussions have been centered on data security and preventing information that TikTok collects on American users from being accessed by the Chinese govenrment.
However, WSJ reports that there is no imminent decision on how to resolve the issues surrounding TikTok and Biden’s administration is expected to determine their own response.
“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. “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.”
The TikTok-US administration saga started in August last year after Trump signed executive orders to ban it and WeChat citing security threats. The company later on sued the Trump Administration over the executive order ban. Later on, we started seeing reports like Microsoft being interested in buying the TikTok US operations. The situation escalated to TikTok US CEO Kevin Mayer resigning after the app was banned by Trump. Somehow, Oracle won the bidding to manage US TikTok operations which was quite surprising.
