| Hi folks, Naomi here. For months, viral video-sharing app TikTok has been waiting on President Joe Biden to make a decision about whether he'll continue a U.S. crackdown on its Chinese parent company, ByteDance Ltd. On Wednesday, TikTok got its answer: Sort of. Biden announced he was revoking former President Donald Trump's bans on Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat. But the White House also directed Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to evaluate apps that could be a national security risk because of ties to foreign adversaries like China. Biden's executive order brings some clarity to what was—as my colleagues chronicle in their podcast Foundering—a dizzying legal and political showdown last year between ByteDance and the highest levels of power in Washington. Eventually, court rulings prevented Trump's orders from taking effect. TikTok was in limbo until this week. Now, U.S. users no longer need to worry that their favorite app is about to disappear. But Biden's latest action doesn't resolve the underlying concerns the Trump administration was seeking to address in the first place: whether TikTok could be used by the authoritarian regime in China to compromise Americans' private information and the country's security—a claim TikTok has repeatedly denied. Biden's executive order offers a glimpse of the kind of red flags his administration will look for in its coming evaluation of Chinese tech companies, including whether platforms are managed by people who support a foreign adversary's military, enable cyber espionage or collect sensitive personal data. The review arrives at a time when suspicion of China has been growing in Washington. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a staunch Trump ally, called Biden's latest executive order a "major mistake" because it didn't go far enough to thwart China's access to Americans' personal information. And last week, Biden largely reinforced a Trump-era ban on U.S. investment in Chinese companies, listing 59 firms with ties to China's military or in the surveillance industry. Recently, his administration has been trying to harness allies abroad to counter China's global influence. The Biden administration may also have a fresh impetus to examine TikTok. Earlier this month, TechCrunch reported that TikTok, which has more than 100 million downloads in the U.S., had changed its privacy policy to allow for the collection of "biometric identifiers and biometric information" from its users, including "faceprints and voiceprints." The social media company said that if required by law, it would get consent before collecting this kind of data, but declined to tell the digital news outlet what sort of product developments were in the works to make the new privacy policy necessary. U.S. regulators may demand that TikTok give a more robust answer than that. —Naomi Nix | 
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