Will Tiktok's deal with Oracle avert India ban?

Amid proposed deal between Chinese social media giant Tiktok and American software firm Oracle, there is ambiguity whether the partnership will cover only short-video app's US operations or complete global operations. Settling all the speculations, Indian government officials have said that TikTok's agreement with Oracle won't ease ban on the app in India.

The popular video-sharing app, along with 58 other apps, was banned in India on June 29 over national security and data privacy concerns.

As per government officials, selecting Oracle as its "trusted tech partner" instead of an "outright sale" may not be "adequate" to assure the central government that the data of Indian users will be safe and won't be sent abroad, reported The Economic Times. The official added that Tiktok will continue to be owned by Chinese firm ByteDance. "There is no way to verify or for them to prove that data transfer is not happening to their servers in China."

Apart from India, TikTok faces major operational issues in countries like the United States, where President Donald Trump has threatened to ban the app in lines of India unless an American company buys it. Trump had given an ultimatum of 90 days to the Chinese company to sell the US operations of TikTok by September 15.

In view of this, TikTok has struck a deal with Oracle to prevent the short-form video app from being banned in the US. As per report, Bytedance has made Oracle its technical partner for TikTok and will not sell the complete operations to the company.

ByteDance that is struggling to soothe the concerns amid anti-China sentiments in India, has assured its 2,000 employees that talks with the Indian government were on and that it had no plans to lay off staff in the country. The micro-video sharing platform had 178 million monthly active users in India with the average time of 36 minutes per day spent on the app.

Also Read: Bytedance picks Oracle over Microsoft for TikTok in US: 5 key points to note

Also Read: TikTok won't sell US business, will partner with Oracle