Balwani’s conviction came six months after a separate jury found Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos’s founder and Balwani’s ex-girlfriend, guilty on four felony counts. A federal jury convicted former Theranos president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani on 12 fraud-related counts Thursday, finding him guilty of perpetuating scams that preceded the blood-testing company’s collapse, Bloomberg reported. The hubbub leaves TikTok, yet again, in a state of political limbo.Ī dark day for Sunny. user data with the Chinese government, nor would we if asked.” (Skeptics have fairly noted that the autocratic Chinese government doesn’t exactly ask when it wants something from its domestic businesses.) In a statement to Fortune’s David Meyer this week, a TikTok spokesperson said the company has “never shared U.S. TikTok has disputed the notion that the Chinese government could nefariously meddle with American user data. At the Washington Post, columnist Josh Rogin, who authored a book last year on modern U.S.-China relations, warned that TikTok “can’t be trusted to oversee itself,” because it “answer to a government that has no checks on its power and no privacy or surveillance standards at all.”

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday on the mounting pressure for President Joe Biden’s administration to take a stronger stance against TikTok. “In light of repeated misrepresentations by TikTok concerning its data security, data processing, and corporate governance practices, we urge you to act promptly on this matter,” the bipartisan duo wrote to FTC Chair Lina Khan. The BuzzFeed report prompted immediate squawking by the GOP’s most ardent China hawks, and it picked up more steam this week as Senate Intelligence Committee chair Mark Warner, D-Va., and vice chair Marco Rubio, R-Fla., called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate TikTok’s data sharing policies. Those admissions appear to contradict the sworn testimony of a TikTok executive, who said at an October 2021 Senate hearing that American users’ data was overseen by a U.S.-based security team. The latest rift stems from a BuzzFeed News report last month in which multiple TikTok employees admitted in recordings from internal company meetings that Chinese engineers had access to U.S.

Yet the renewed hostility shows that TikTok remains firmly in American politicians’ sights-and isn’t getting let off the hook anytime soon. policymakers fear the Chinese government could access vast troves of data collected by TikTok on the app’s 100 million–plus American users, allowing their geopolitical enemy to push out propaganda and build profiles on U.S. The issue behind the latest episode isn’t necessarily novel. The world’s fastest-growing social media platform, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is facing the most aggressive assault on its American operations since former President Donald Trump sought to ban it two years ago.

Who owns tik tok