TikTok accepts revisions as Trump prepares proposal review

WASHINGTON >> The Chinese company that owns TikTok has accepted the Trump administration’s changes to a deal designed to mitigate the White House’s concerns that the popular app poses a national security threat, two people with knowledge of the talks said.

The Treasury Department, which leads a group reviewing the deal for national security purposes, provided TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, with revisions to its proposal Wednesday, one of the people said. Some of the revisions were intended to address how TikTok’s data and source code would be handled and secured, one of the people said. The two sides have agreed in principle but are still discussing some technical details, the other person said.

The exact ownership structure of TikTok under the proposed deal is unclear. President Donald Trump and some members of his administration have said that ByteDance cannot retain a majority stake in TikTok if their concerns are to be satisfied. Oracle, the Silicon Valley business software-maker, is set to be a technology partner for TikTok while taking an ownership stake in the app but would not own it outright, people with knowledge of the situation have said.

Any resolution on ownership could involve some tricky math. The percentage of TikTok owned by non-U.S. interests depends partly on how officials treat the portion of ByteDance, a privately held company, that is already backed by U.S. investors, one person said.

TikTok would also go public on a U.S. stock