Sept 26 (Reuters) – U.S. lawmakers and TikTok are drawing up a plan under which the short-form video app would make changes to its data security and governance without requiring its parent company, China’s ByteDance, to sale, the New York Times reported Monday.
TikTok and the Biden administration have drafted a preliminary agreement to resolve national security concerns but are still deciding on a potential deal, the Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
A TikTok spokesperson declined to comment on the report, but said the app was confident it could “fully meet all reasonable national security concerns of the United States.”
ByteDance and the White House did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
TikTok has long faced scrutiny from US lawmakers, who have questioned the Chinese-owned app’s protection of user data.
It has been more than two years since a US national security panel ordered parent company ByteDance to ditch TikTok over fears that US user data could be passed to China’s communist government.
TikTok is one of the most popular social media apps in the world, with over a billion active users worldwide, with the United States as its largest market.
(Reporting by Eva Mathews in Bengaluru; Editing in Spanish by Vicente Valdivia)
