by As TikTok owner ByteDance pulls out of the gaming business, Tencent (0700.HK), the world’s largest video game company, is among potential buyers of its gaming assets.
As of this writing, no deal has yet been reached but talks are ongoing.
ByteDance and Tencent are discussing a deal combining several famous video games, such as “Crystal of Atland” and “Earth: Revival” produced by ByteDance’s Nuverse gaming division.
Five years after it began its highly publicized entry into the $185 billion (£145 billion) global video game market, ByteDance said in November that it will restructure Nuverse and exit the gaming industry to focus on other core operations .
The company ended development on games without prior notice and planned to sell titles that had already been released, as Reuters reported at the time.
Meanwhile, ByteDance’s video-sharing app TikTok has become an inescapable cultural phenomenon in recent years, with more than a billion users around the globe. Here’s everything we know about the app’s parent company.
Who owns TikTok?
The video sharing app is owned by a Beijing-based company called ByteDance. The Chinese internet technology company was founded in 2012 and has created several platforms, which are believed to host 1.9 billion active users every month.
ByteDance’s first creation was a platform called Neihan Duanzi, which stands for “depth gags”. It was a platform for jokes, memes and funny videos.
Later, in 2012, he launched a news platform called Toutiao, which means “headlines”.
In 2016, the company expanded, hiring former Microsoft Research Asia managing director Wei-Ying Ma to head up its AI lab.
Its era of finding smaller apps and companies with potential began with Indonesian news platform BABE. Shortly after, he bought Flipgram and Musical.ly. The merger of these two platforms led to the birth of TikTok.
TikTok’s journey began as A.me, before becoming Douyin in 2016, an app targeting the Chinese market that attracted over a billion video views on a daily basis.
That same app was released in the international market with TikTok in September 2017 and quickly worked its way up app stores and pop culture trends.
Who else accused TikTok of revealing personal data?
Conservative MP Alicia Kearns has previously warned Brits not to use the app, believing it to be unsafe. She said the video-sharing platform was exposing users’ personal data to “hostile” threats, particularly the Chinese government.
“You don’t deserve to have that vulnerability on your phone. It is the ultimate source of data for anyone with hostile efforts,” Ms Kearns told Sky News.
She added: “Our data is a critical vulnerability and China is building a totalitarian technological state on the back of our data. So we have to be much more serious about protecting ourselves.”
TikTok has denied that it would ever give users’ personal information to others.
However, TikTok’s parent company is known to have used TikTok data to track down some Western journalists and find their sources.
In November 2019, a class action lawsuit was filed in California, which claimed that TikTok transferred personally identifiable information of US users to servers owned by Chinese technology conglomerates Tencent and Alibaba.
The lawsuit accused ByteDance of taking TikTok users’ content without their permission. The plaintiff in the case shared how the company used her biometric data to create an account in her name on TikTok.
In July 2020, 20 other similar lawsuits emerged and were merged into one class action lawsuit in Illinois.
TikTok decided to settle the lawsuit by paying $92 million (£77 million) in February 2021.
The US government has openly voiced its opposition to the platform and the foreign affairs committee is set to vote on whether to ban the app in the country later this month.
TikTok hopes to avoid the ban and, in January 2023, offered to share data with United States officials about how its proposed algorithms work.
TikTok is banned in India, along with several other Chinese apps, as the nation believes its national security and defense are at risk.
Before the ban, India was TikTok’s largest international market, with more than 200 million users.
What personal data can TikTok access?
Apart from the personal data that users choose to create their account and profile, TikTok can figure out their IP address and what other apps they have on their phone.
Although it can’t learn your geolocation without your permission, the app has a habit of repeatedly knowing your location even after you deny it.
The app is able to learn a lot from what you watch, when and where you watch it, and who you interact with. It uses this type of personal data to customize your algorithm.
