TikTok Faces Ban in US and Stops Operation in HongKong
The US Secretary Mike Pompeo said that they are looking at banning TikTok as it’s being used as a surveillance tool by the Chinese Government. A major blow to TikTok was dealt with when it was banned in India along with 58 other applications. Now a ban in the USA will be another huge market shut down leading the company to face many losses. After this statement by Mr. Pompeo, TikTok has said that it is halting its services in HongKong after the Chinese Government promulgated the National Security Law which has put pressure on the company to give data to the Chinese government. “In light of recent events, we’ve decided to stop operations of the TikTok app in Hong Kong,” said a TikTok spokesperson. The rumors say that Tiktok might relaunch a censored version for the users in HongKong. ByteDance, founded by the prolific Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming, has been working to disassociate TikTok from its control of China and censorship in Beijing. Efforts ranged from holding a TikTok overseas data center potentially out of control by the Chinese government, offering a glimpse of its development process to international experts, to hiring Kevin Mayer from Disney as the new global face of the device. The non comply data orders come in as showing solidarity with the protestors and most importantly stand with Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Telegram who said they would either block or suspend requests from the Hong Kong government for data review from this week. Source – TechCrunch
