News & Reviews:   TikTok

TechNave NewsBytes 2020 #27 - Huawei, Samsung, Lenovo, Shopee, TikTok, Revenue Monster, Astro Ultra Box, Grab + Fave, vivo, Kaspersky, Aspirasi, Epson, Google + MDEC + MATTA, Signify, Facebook and Special: Samsung Galaxy S20FE

Previously, ByteDance had rejected Microsoft's offer in acquiring the company and we wondered what could happen next. Well, turns out that we got our answer sooner than we thought as it has been confirmed that TikTok is indeed working with Oracle and Walmart as well.

As many of you already know, TikTok is already banned in India alongside other over 100 mobile apps. From a business point of view, this is a big loss as India used to be one of the largest markets for TikTok. If there's no TikTok substitute, where do the Indian user turn to? Introducing YouTube Shorts. 

Right after US President's executive order on banning TikTok, it was also reported that Microsoft was interested in acquiring the company from ByteDance. After a few weeks, we had to wait if the acquisition was successful or not but it turned out that Microsoft is no longer acquiring TikTok due to the rejection by ByteDance.

Based on a statement by comparitech, it seems that around 235 million profile data from accounts originating from TikTok, Instagram, as well as Youtube, have been exposed through the use of scraping. For those who are not familiar with scraping, it is an automated process that collects user information from public webpages from the aforementioned social media platforms.

It might seem like a good April Fool's joke but it's not. Just a few hours ago, hip-hop artist-turned-Christian, Kanye West just tweeted about having a vision called "Jesus Tok" and he is interested in working with TikTok to develop a Christian-theme app version.

By now, you should have heard the news about TikTok facing a ban thanks to US President Trump due to 'spying'. It may sound ridiculous but the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) just posted news that TikTok may have violated Google's privacy policy for tracking MAC addresses from Android users.

So not only TikTok is in trouble, but so as WeChat since US President Trump released an executive order to ban the social app on 7 August 2020. Should the app be banned, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicted that the iPhone global shipments could decline 25-30%, but why?

While Microsoft is in the middle of a negotiation with TikTok, the latest news is that Twitter Inc may be interested in acquiring the company as well. According to Reuters, the information was shared by two anonymous people on this matter as Twitter have already approached ByteDance, TikTok's parent company.

Tension for TikTok is rising as US President Donald Trump has just issued an executive order to ban the app in 45 days. It's not just TikTok though, as WeChat just got pulled into the situation as well for the same days given for the ban. That said, WeChat belongs to Tencent Holdings Ltd in China, so does this mean that the ban could extend to PUBG Mobile and other video game companies (partially) owned by them?