Tik Tok

[Pigeon]

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China will not accept the "theft" of a Chinese technology company and is able to respond to Washington's move to push ByteDance to sell short-video app TikTok's U.S. operations to Microsoft, the China Daily newspaper said on Tuesday.

The United States' "bullying" of Chinese tech companies was a consequence of Washington's zero-sum vision of "American first" and left China no choice but "submission or mortal combat in the tech realm", the state-backed paper said in an editorial.

China had "plenty of ways to respond if the administration carries out its planned smash and grab", it added.

Microsoft Corp <MSFT.O> said on Monday it was in talks with ByteDance to buy parts of TikTok after U.S. President Donald Trump reversed course on a plan to ban the app on national security grounds and gave the firms 45 days to strike a deal.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said over the weekend that Trump would take action shortly against Chinese software companies that shared user data with the Chinese government.

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China doing the same crap the US does with spying on people.

Trump wants a cut of the sale. What kind of BS it that. Will the same apply to any other companies that get bought.

If the sale doesn't happen then there will be a giant temper tantrum when some restrictions hit.

[Royal]

If I had a choice of US spying or China spying. Which would be a more benevolent god?

[Pigeon]

TikTok is up for grabs. But while the popular short-form video app likely won't lack for suitors, President Donald Trump says the US government needs to get a "substantial amount of money" as part of any deal.

It's a demand that experts say is far outside the norm at best, and if it were to be met could set a dangerous precedent.

"It's really not for the President to say that a deal can go through or a deal can't go through, or that a company must pay a ransom to the United States government or get a deal done by a particular deadline," said Avery Gardiner, general counsel and senior fellow for competition, data and power at the Center for Democracy and Technology. "That's very unusual, it's more than very unusual. It's wrong, it doesn't happen."

The US government's authority to compel foreign firms to sell their business to an American company comes primarily from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). CFIUS has stepped up its scrutiny of Chinese-owned firms in recent years as tensions between the United States and China on technology escalate — the committee recently forced the Chinese owners of Grindr to sell the gay dating app to a US-based company over national security concerns.

[Royal]

If I had a choice of US spying or China spying. Which would be a more benevolent god?

Depend on your country.

I cheat - good. You cheat - bad.

Once a god is appointed, watch out.

Funny. You edited my quote to prove a point.

Although its never good to cheat. Ask our own who "lived strong".

Big ethical quandary created.

[Pigeon]

If I had a choice of US spying or China spying. Which would be a more benevolent god?

Depend on your country.

I cheat - good. You cheat - bad.

Once a god is appointed, watch out.

[Pigeon]

You edited my quote to prove a point.

Negative on that assumption.

[Pigeon]

Should the US stop using any Chinese apps. If so it may be a problem since many people only care about doing as they wish.

[Royal]

IF we want to, we can pull Tik Tok from phones harder than Building 7.

[Pigeon]

TikTok, one of the applications for computers as a entertainment toy.

[Pigeon]

A small U.S. company with ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities has embedded its software in numerous mobile apps, allowing it to track the movements of hundreds of millions of mobile phones world-wide, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter and documents it reviewed.

From the report:

Anomaly Six, a Virginia-based company founded by two U.S. military veterans with a background in intelligence, said in marketing material it is able to draw location data from more than 500 mobile applications, in part through its own software development kit, or SDK, that is embedded directly in some of the apps. An SDK allows the company to obtain the phone's location if consumers have allowed the app containing the software to access the phone's GPS coordinates. App publishers often allow third-party companies, for a fee, to insert SDKs into their apps. The SDK maker then sells the consumer data harvested from the app, and the app publisher gets a chunk of revenue. But consumers have no way to know whether SDKs are embedded in apps; most privacy policies don't disclose that information.

Anomaly Six says it embeds its own SDK in some apps, and in other cases gets location data from other partners. Anomaly Six is a federal contractor that provides global-location-data products to branches of the U.S. government and private-sector clients. The company told The Wall Street Journal it restricts the sale of U.S. mobile phone movement data only to nongovernmental, private-sector clients. Numerous agencies of the U.S. government have concluded that mobile data acquired by federal agencies from advertising is lawful. Several law-enforcement agencies are using such data for criminal-law enforcement, the Journal has reported, while numerous U.S. military and intelligence agencies also acquire this kind of data.

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