There is still much uncertainty surrounding the future of the popular social media platform TikTok as the company looks for a buyer for its US operations.
The platform went dark in the United States for about 14 hours just over a week ago due to a federal ban after parent company ByteDance didn’t meet the deadline to sell its US operations.
The ban did not last long, though, as the Trump administration granted an extension.
Local tech blogger Kevin Andrews says the issue is that ByteDance is a Chinese company, and laws in that country allow the government to access all of the user data, creating privacy concerns.
Andrews says there are several potential buyers, so it is hard to tell who will get it and what will happen.
However, as Andrews explains, “national security concerns” could remain if ByteDance keeps a significant stake in the company.
He says the issues boil down to two main concerns: where the data servers will be located, and TikTok’s algorithm. He says any buyer would have to build the algorithm again from scratch, which would be costly.