Comment by patmcc
>>>mainly that they are HQ'd in that government's jurisdiction
ByteDance is; TikTok is not. TikTok is headquartered in USA and Taiwan. Why is that not part of the analysis? The CCP can control/influence ByteDance, the US can't do anything about that. But it could do a number of things to prevent ByteDance control/influence on TikTok, and it jumped directly to "must divest".
Congress could have passed a law banning TikTok from transmitting any user data back to ByteDance/China, for example. Why not do that, if that was the actual concern?
Well, reporting as recent as April of 2024 suggested that Bytedance is able to access tiktok user data despite Operation Texas. And generally speaking, we have seen enough in the way of (1) security breaches and (2) leaky promises not to disclose data either to govts or 3rd party data brokers, only for those reassurances to fall flat. I would even go so far as to say that professions to uphold trade agreements or international agreements are uniquely "soft" in their seriousness from China in recent history.
Guarantees of insulation from bad actors from major tech companies unfortunately are not generally credible, and what is credible, at least relatively speaking, are guarantees imposed by technology itself such as E2E encryption and zero knowledge architecture, as well as contextual considerations like the long term track record of specific companies, details of their ownership and their physical locations.