It is no secret that the United States is very concerned that the most popular app of the moment, TikTok, is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, which is closely linked and controlled by the government of that Asian country. For that reason, U.S. authorities have been working for over a year to try to ban the platform or at least end the close relationship between China and the social network.
And it seems that the U.S. goal is getting closer, because in recent months debates in the U.S. Congress on how to curb TikTok have intensified, with its ban getting closer as it now has the support of both parties, something that does not happen very often.
The main concern of the U.S. is that TikTok emulates what Facebook (now Meta) did at the time and uses the data collected from its users to satisfy Beijing’s interests. The Chinese company has faced intense scrutiny in recent years about what data it collects, how it stores it, what it uses it for, and who has access.
While TikTok stores user data in the U.S., it also keeps a copy in Singapore, and it has been discovered that the app collects a huge amount of information that is not initially necessary for the correct functioning of the app besides Chinese TikTok employees have been able to access the platform’s servers, and access all this collected information.
All this has led to the U.S. Senate finally passing a new law, which they have been trying to implement for several months, and which will allow the national prohibition of TikTok in case its parent company, ByteDance, does not sell it.
This legislation will give ByteDance 270 days to sell TikTok so that it is not removed from the country’s app stores and Internet services of the United States, as reported by CNN.
This imposes the disconnection of the Chinese company from TikTok to continue operating in the U.S., which is the main market of the social network with over 150 million monthly active users. This puts the Chinese company in a difficult situation.
The countdown will not start until the President of the U.S., Joe Biden, signs the law, and then he may even give an extra 90 days if he sees ByteDance’s intention to sell. However, according to sources close to Bloomberg, the Chinese company intends to exhaust all legal avenues before considering any divestment.
During the same vote, senators also approved using frozen Russian assets to financially assist Ukraine, as well as a multibillion-dollar aid package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan worth a total of about 90 billion euros, more than half of which will be allocated to Kiev.
