Judging by what the morning newspapers are reporting, the Trump Administration has completely failed to address the core issue involving TikTok: the Chinese parent company Byte Dance, and by implication the Chinese government, will retain control of the AI-powered algorithmns that thrill teenagers as well as the data the app collects about those users.
The Administration appears to have signed off on the deal because two White House-friendly companies, Oracle and Walmart, get pieces of the action and TikTok says it will pay $5 billion in new taxes. Plus it will hire thousands more Americans.
In the eyes of the Chinese government, this is a clear win. The Americans did not follow through on their stated intention: to eliminate a national security threat. The threat of either shutting TikTok down entirely in the United States, as India has done, or forcing a clean sale into American hands was hollow.
David Sanger, writing in the Times here, notes that foreign appls “are now, for the first time, becoming deeply embedded on the screens of Americans’ smartphones, and thus in the daily fabric of American digital life.”
TikTok is therefore a perfect complement to the outright theft of hundreds of millions of pieces of data that China has stolen from the Office of Personnel Management, Marriott Hotels, Equifax, America’s cloud computing providers and others. “The forest is on fire, and we are spraying a garden hose on a bush,” said Amy Zegart, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and Standford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute.
