Recall that Oracle and ByteDance have a proposal on the
table for Oracle to take a minority partnership position in ByteDance's
TikTok. In response to objections to that, some
Trump administration officials are looking to give
American investors a majority share of the company that will take over the
Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok[.]
Senators Marco Rubio (R, FL), Rick Scott (R, FL), Thom
Tillis (R, NC), Roger Wicker (R, MI), Dan Sullivan (R, AK), and John Cornyn (R,
TX), object to that, too.
Any deal between an American company and ByteDance
must ensure that TikTok's US operations, data, and algorithms are entirely
outside the control of ByteDance or any Chinese-state directed actors,
including any entity that can be compelled by Chinese law to turn over or
access US consumer data.
The Senators are absolutely correct. Any fraction of
ownership by a People's Republic of China company that's greater than zero is
too much; giving, as it would, the PRC's intelligence community access to all
the data TikTok scoops up from the individuals and businesses that use it.
That intelligence access, too, was explicitly made an on-demand access by a PRC law enacted in 2017.
Eric Hines
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