ByteDance may want to spin off TikTok in the US

China’s ByteDance may want to spin off TikTok in the United States. If a deal with the US government falls through, the company fears the app could be banned in the US. A split should prevent that.

This may involve a sale of the American branch or an IPO, so says Bloomberg. The company sees the spin-off of TikTok’s American branch as a last resort to avoid a ban on the app. Politicians in the US want to ban the app because of the risk of espionage. ByteDance is a Chinese company and the Chinese government can therefore request and view all user data of Western users.

To avoid a ban, TikTok has proposed to store all data of American users in the US with Oracle. Oracle may also inspect the code together with a supervisor appointed by the US government. This concerns the current source code and changes in updates.

There is no concrete proposal yet for a ban on TikTok in Europe, although officials from the EU and many Member States are not allowed to have the app on their phones due to the same fear of espionage. TikTok also wants to house data from European users in a data center of a European company and have the code inspected in Europe. It is not yet known which European company will do this.