TikTok has been awarded a life-line after a US federal court ruled to delay its impending ban.
Earlier this year, US President Donald Trump said the popular Chinese video-sharing platform’s ability to handle user data as well as its relationship with the parent company, ByteDance, raised national security concerns.
The Verge reports that motivation for the ban stems from the fact that “lawmakers allege that TikTok could be pressured into handing over data or other intelligence to the Chinese Communist Party”.
However, TikTok hit back saying that was “led by an American CEO, with hundreds of employees and key leaders across safety, security, product, and public policy here in the US. We have no higher priority than promoting a safe and secure app experience for our users. We have never provided user data to the Chinese government, nor would we do so if asked”.
The current ruling will allow American users to continue to access the app while giving the court more time to determine whether or not the platform poses a threat.
ByteDance Forms TikTok Global as part of Oracle Deal
ByteDance is creating a new company called TikTok Global that will be responsible for providing all TikTok services to users in the United States and most of the users in the rest of the world.
TikTok Global is expected to be majority-owned by American investors, including Oracle and Walmart (20%), and with four Americans out of the five-member Board of Directors. It also aims to create more than 25,000 new jobs in the United States and pay more than $5 billion in new tax dollars to the US Treasury.
As part of this deal, Oracle will become the company’s cloud provider and all of its data will be hosted at the Generation 2 Cloud data centres.
