TikTok Faces Possible Ban from the US Congress

There have been concerns raised about TikTok's data privacy practices and its potential ties to the Chinese government. Specifically, there have been worries that TikTok could be collecting user data and sharing it with the Chinese government or using it for other nefarious purposes.

In August 2020, President Trump signed an executive order that would have effectively banned TikTok in the US, citing national security concerns. The order would have required TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, to divest from its US operations. However, the ban was later blocked by federal courts.

Since then, there have been ongoing discussions in Congress about the potential risks associated with TikTok and other Chinese-owned apps. Some lawmakers have introduced bills that would ban TikTok from government-issued devices or restrict its use by federal employees.

In December 2020, a bill was introduced in Congress that would prohibit federal employees from using TikTok on government-issued devices. The bill cited concerns about data security and suggested that TikTok could be used to "conduct espionage against the United States."

in March 2021, two senators reintroduced a bill that would ban TikTok from all government devices, arguing that the app poses a "national security threat."

 

More recently,, TikTok's CEO, Shou Zi Chew, is giving testimony in the US Congress for the first time, a scary thing to do.

The big problem TikTok has in the US and Europe is that it is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance.

And in China, there are specific laws that require companies to hand over information to the Chinese Communist Party if requested.

 

The company had declare numerus times that it would never give information of his users and in its attempt to convince US lawmakers is "Project Texas".

This is the company's commitment to store US data in the US - on servers run by a US company - Oracle.

The company says so far it has spent $1.5bn on this project - and describes it as a "firewall" that protects data from foreign governments.

 

We will still need to see what would be the US Congress decision but for now the future of TikTok is unknow.