It is coming to light that Bytedance, the parent company of the popular social media app TiKTok, had offered the US government the ability to control the platform in the form of a “kill switch”. That options would have operated exactly as its name implies: the ability to shut down the platform, should the US determine that some form of hanky-panky was happening with the app.
The disclosure of such an offer comes as ByteDance and TikTok enter into their legal battle with the US government, after the Senate passed the bill, ordering the social media platform to sell its business in the country, or face an outright ban altogether.
The offer of a kill switch was made back in 2022, and included provisions such as properly funding data protection units and ensuring that parent company ByteDance did not have access to data belonging to its US database. According to TiKTok, though, the offer was reportedly tossed out the window, and the US government ceasing any substantive negotiations thereafter.
Much of the concern over TikTok in the US stems from the fact the app could potentially share the data of its 170 million US users with the Chinese government. Unsurprisingly, Both the app and its parent company have denied these allegations, and the Chinese government has accused the US of “banditry”. In response, one of the US ambassadors called out China’s “hypocrisy” on the issue, that the communist government had also blocked several Western platforms in the past, with Google being a prime example.
As a point of fairness, TikTok as a company is based out of Singapore and for another matter, the app isn’t even allowed to operate in China; Bytedance had to create a separate yet similar version of the app called Douyin, in order to run in the country.
(Source: Techspot)
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