In a few hours, Amazon retracted the issue of banning Tik Tok from employees ’mobile devices, and the e-commerce giant mistakenly described the move.
This news has aroused widespread interest in the Chinese-owned social media platform, and comes the same week that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States is studying a ban on tic-tac, because it shares information with the Chinese government.
It was not immediately clear why Tik Tok was banned by Amazon, and one of the people familiar with the matter said that Amazon's top executives were unaware of the request to remove Tik Tok from employees ’devices.
The ban was canceled after Tik Tok and Amazon representatives discussed the matter, according to an email sent to Chinese application staff.
Wells Fargo, an American financial services company, sent a memo earlier this week to employees who installed Tik Tok on the company's mobile devices asking them to remove the app immediately.
"Because of concerns about Tik Tok's controls and practices related to privacy and security, and because company-owned devices should only be used in the company's business, we have directed these employees to remove the app from their devices," the company said in a statement.
A spokesman for Tik Tok said, "We were not contacted by Wells Fargo, and we are open to dealing with it constructively and informing us of the measures we have taken to protect the data security of our users."
These events highlight the difficult situation that the Chinese developer, ByteDance, has been facing in recent days.
The Chinese application has become among the fastest growing digital platforms ever, and is subject to severe scrutiny on a number of issues, including user data processing, and India banned the application and other Chinese applications last June.
Bytes Dance said that user data is stored in the United States with a backup in Singapore, while one person familiar with the matter said that user data is primarily stored in Google Cloud, the data center in Virginia.
But that did not prevent Pompeo from talking about the possibility of a ban on Tik Tok in the United States, and when asked if Americans should download it, he told Fox News "only if you want your private information to be in the hands of the CPC."
On Friday, the Republican National Committee asked its members by e-mail not to download Tik Tok, as it reminded yesterday of the December directive that asked members to stop downloading the application.
Two Republicans in the Senate last March submitted a bill aimed at preventing federal employees from using Tik Tok on government phones because of national security concerns about collecting and sharing US user data with the Chinese government.
The US Navy last year banned the application from government-issued mobile devices, saying it posed a threat to cybersecurity.
Last November, the US government launched a review of Byte Dance's acquisition of Musical.ly's social communication app for $ 1 billion.
Reuters reported earlier that to address concerns about its Chinese ownership, Bit Dance has taken steps to shift its center of operations away from China.
A company spokesman said this week that he was also looking to make changes to the structure of Tik Tok for the same reasons.