The United States Government has required the company that owns the popular Tik Tok application, the Chinese company ByteDance, to distribute its shares if it wants to continue operating in its territory, a move that occurs after two years of negotiations between the country and the the company that owns the application, about which there are doubts regarding the protection of the data of its more than one hundred million users in the North American country.
The Committee on Foreign Investment of the United States (CFIUS, for its acronym in English) would have demanded that the parent company ByteDance sell its shares in the application, according to information from ‘The Wall Street Journal’, which also details that 60 percent of The company’s shares are owned by global investors, 20 percent by its employees and another 20 percent by its founders.
A Tik Tok spokeswoman, Brooke Oberwetter, has expressed doubts about this possible roadmap in a statement: “If the objective is to protect national security, the division of shares does not solve the problem, a change in ownership (of the application) would not impose any new restrictions on access or data flow”.
He has also suggested that the best way to address the concerns of the US government is to establish a system of protection for US users based in that country, with “robust monitoring” by third parties, greater scrutiny and verification, processes that They assure that they are already being implemented.
The CEO of Tik Tok, Shou Zi Chew, will go to the United States Congress next week to declare in a hearing that will address these issues, although the White House has not directly confirmed or denied the information from ‘The Wall Street Journal’.
A PULSE BETWEEN CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES THROUGH THE APP
In February, the US administration ordered the app to be removed from all official phone devices, a decision ridiculed by the Chinese government: “How does the world’s top superpower have to be afraid of the favorite app of young people? ?”.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said the United States abuses the “concept of national security” and its own powers to penalize foreign companies.
