SAN FRANCISCO - US retail giant Walmart said Thursday it had teamed with Microsoft in a bid to buy Chinese-owned short-form video app TikTok.
The app has been at the center of a diplomatic storm between Washington and Beijing after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on August 6 giving Americans 45 days to stop doing business with its Chinese parent company ByteDance.
The move effectively set a deadline for a sale of TikTok to a US company.
"We are confident that a Walmart and Microsoft partnership would meet both the expectations of US TikTok users while satisfying the concerns of US government regulators," the retailer told AFP.
Walmart is likely interested in TikTok to better connect with younger shoppers who turn to the internet for lifestyle trends, according to analysts.
Younger people are much less likely to shop at Walmart, whether online or in real-world stores, according to GlobalData Retail managing director Neil Saunders.
"A social platform like TikTok would give Walmart easy access to the very audience it wants and needs to attract," Saunders said.
Having access to the social media sensation could help Walmart's marketing campaigns while tapping into "a rich seam of data" or product development and more, according to Saunders.
Walmart teaming with US technology colossus Microsoft was "the final piece of the puzzle that ultimately cements Microsoft successfully acquiring TikTok's US operations for likely $35 billion to $40 billion," according to Wedbush analyst Dan Ives.
'HIGH-STAKES POKER'
"While deal negotiations will be complex with a number of technology and data privacy issues that need to be worked out before an agreement is inked, we believe ByteDance is playing a game of high stakes poker with Microsoft looking like the only true white knight around," Ives said in a note to investors.
TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer said Wednesday he had quit the company as tensions soar between Washington and Beijing over the Chinese-owned video platform.
Mayer's departure was taken by some in the market as a sign that a deal to sell TikTok is imminent. Oracle is also said to be in the bidding
Mayer's resignation came just days after TikTok filed a lawsuit challenging a crackdown by the US government over claims the wildly popular social media app can be used to spy on Americans.
TikTok, which has been downloaded 175 million times in the US and more than a billion times around the world, argued in the suit that Trump's order was a misuse of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
The platform -- on which users share often playful short-form videos -- is not "an unusual and extraordinary threat," it said.
The platform's kaleidoscopic feeds of clips feature everything from dance routines and hair-dye tutorials to jokes about daily life and politics.
The company holds firm that it has never provided any US user data to the Chinese government, and Beijing has blasted Trump's crackdown as political.
Agence France-Presse
India demanded answers from WhatsApp over a snooping scandal Thursday after coming under fire from critics who accused authorities of using malware installed on the Facebook-owned messaging service to spy on citizens.
WhatsApp has filed a lawsuit in the United States against Israeli technology firm NSO Group, accusing it of using the hugely popular instant messaging platform to conduct cyberespionage on nearly 1,400 journalists, diplomats, dissidents and human right activists worldwide.
The Israeli firm has denied journalists and activists were targeted and said that it only licenses its software to governments for "fighting crime and terror".
Nearly two dozen activists, lawyers and journalists were targeted in India -- WhatsApp's biggest market with some 400 million active users -- according to Indian media reports.
The Indian Express reported WhatsApp confirmed a number of Indian users had been targeted by the Pegasus spyware, which installed itself on their devices and relayed back data to the hackers.
New Delhi has asked WhatsApp to "explain the kind of breach and what it is doing to safeguard the privacy of millions of Indian citizens," information and technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad wrote on Twitter, denying the government had used the malware to spy on its citizens.
But opposition leaders accused the government of invading citizens' privacy.
"A government that spies on journalists/activists/Opposition leaders and treats its own citizens like criminals has lost the right to lead in our democracy," main opposition Congress party spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said in a tweet.
Indian media reports said 20 activists, lawyers and journalists were informed by WhatsApp recently that their phones were compromised for two weeks in May.
Rights activists and dissidents in India have accused the Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government of intimidating them over their criticism of policies.
Since Modi's ascent to the top post in 2014, it has banned hundreds of non government organisations and stopped funding of many more.
Rupali Jadhav, an activist, and one of those contacted by WhatsApp said she suspected that she was targeted for her work on caste, class and gender rights.
"We are told India is a democracy. But if our right to privacy is violated, doesn't that raise questions?" she told an Indian online outlet.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
SAN FRANCISCO — WhatsApp sued Israeli cybersurveillance firm NSO Group in federal court Tuesday, claiming the company used the popular messaging service in a wide-ranging spy campaign on journalists and human-rights activists.
WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, claims in the lawsuit that an NSO Group program used WhatsApp to spy on more than 1,400 targets in 20 countries, including 100 journalists and human rights activists.
Over the past six months, WhatsApp, working closely with Citizen Lab, a research group affiliated with the University of Toronto, discovered an attack on its users.
The investigation started last spring after Citizen Lab charged that NSO Group’s technology had exploited a WhatsApp security hole to hack the phone of a London lawyer. The lawyer represented several plaintiffs in lawsuits that accused NSO Group of providing tools to hack the phones of a Saudi Arabian dissident living in Canada, a Qatari citizen and a group of Mexican journalists and activists.
The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. NSO Group did not immediately respond to request for comment.
In its lawsuit, WhatsApp said that between April and May 2019, it discovered NSO Group tools were used to hijack the phones of its users. WhatsApp said that based on the country codes of the numbers targeted, NSO Group’s tools were used to hack the phones of people in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico.
WhatsApp said in a statement that it was informing affected customers with special WhatsApp messages. The company is seeking a permanent injunction banning NSO from its service and called on lawmakers to ban the use of cyberweapons like those sold by NSO Group to governments all over the world.
“We agree with U.N. Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression David Kaye’s call for a moratorium on these attacks,” WhatsApp said in a statement. “There must be strong legal oversight of cyber weapons like the one used in this attack to ensure they are not used to violate individual rights and freedoms people deserve wherever they are in the world.”
source: news.abs-cbn.com
