In this 2020, also due to the health emergency due to the pandemic caused by the coronavirus, applications with a strong social component, they have risen to global prominence and among these the Chinese have made the lion's share TikTok, which has achieved success beyond belief thanks to the millions and millions of amateur videos made daily by its numerous users. Developed by ByteDance, the app has raised especially in the United States a media fuss because of its alleged privacy violations and related sending of user data to Chinese servers. For this reason the US president Donald Trump he has repeatedly feared the blocking of the social network from American soil and welcomed the news he saw with serenity Microsoft products intending to buy TikTok.
Yet, based on what has emerged in the very last few hours, the plan of the Redmond company seems to be destined to be wrecked precisely because of ByteDance. The company founded by Bill Gates has in fact posted a brief on its official website Press release with which he announces the end of negotiations with the Chinese company for the purchase of the social network. Below we propose the translation:
ByteDance let us know today that they would not sell TikTok's US assets to Microsoft. We were confident that our proposal would be good for TikTok users, protecting national security interests. To do this, we would have made significant changes to ensure that the service met the highest standards of security, privacy, online security and the fight against disinformation, and we clarified all of these principles in our August statement. We can't wait to see how the service evolves in these important areas.
The rejection of Microsoft's takeover offer would be, according to the Wall Street Journal, the first step of a new agreement that will see ByteDance and Oracle collaborate with each other and where the latter will be appointed as a "trusted tech partner" in the USA, or trusted technological partner. In this way, the Chinese company is convinced that it can satisfy the Trump administration, which had ordered the transfer of the US assets of the social media to an American company by 20 September. The possible agreement with Oracle could comply with this constraint without however forcing ByteDance to dispose of its assets. At this point, we just have to wait for further developments on this particular story.
