A national security deal between TikTok and the Biden administration, which was expected to be sealed around the year-end, has been delayed further and increased worry over the issue of popular applications posing national-security concerns, as per the US officials.
The review has been extended amid various concerns which include how algorithm-related information will be shared by TikTok and the amount of trust Washington would need to have in the company, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
TikTok has not been approached by US officials lately with the additional demands to address the concerns raised recently, leaving the forward path unclear.
A spokeswoman of TikTok said that they are looking forward to a “timely conclusion to our agreement with the U.S. government, much of which we have already started implementing in earnest so that we can put these concerns to rest.”
She added that no unmet, remaining concerns have been raised by the government with the company. The Committee on Foreign Investment, which is a secretive panel of the government to review business deals related to security concerns, is leading the negotiations from the US side.
The talks were aimed at reducing the influence of the Chinese government on the operations in the US, without severing Chinese ties with TikTok completely. It has been agreed by both sides that Oracle Corp will be used to store the data collected by TikTok on US users.
TikTok has stated that it plans to delete private data on US users from its data centres in Singapore and Virginia as it will be storing the complete data with Oracle cloud infrastructure.
(With inputs from agencies)
