Microsoft's 'tight' ties to China under scrutiny ahead of potential TikTok purchase

By Hollie McKay
Published 1 day ago

As trade talks between the United States and China continue to crumble
amid the global coronavirus pandemic, which emanated from the Chinese
city of Wuhan, the issue of data-stealing has surfaced as a point of
contention for the Trump administration.

At the top of the flashpoint pile is the White House’s push for either
an all-out ban or the forced sale of TikTok -- the seemingly innocuous
dance video app owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance and used by more
than 100 million Americans -- that has been painted by the White House
as a serious national and cybersecurity threat. While TikTok is
preparing to launch a legal challenge in response to Trump’s executive
order -- which gave the parent company 90 days to divest its U.S.
operations -- Microsoft is still leading the charge to purchase the app.

But it is far from smooth sailing, as some experts have expressed
concern that the Bill Gates-founded tech conglomerate’s long and tight
relationship with Beijing may do little to make Americans’ personal
information safer.

“Microsoft's ties in China is as tight as it gets in terms of an
American tech company's presence and influence in China,� Nina Xiang,
an expert of Chinese technology and venture capital, and founder of the
Hong Kong-based artificial intelligence monitoring firm China Money
Network, told Fox News.

Cut!

Moreover, the company last year came under scrutiny for its work with a
Chinese military-operated university. Three papers published between
March and November 2019 were co-written by academics from both the
Microsoft Research Asia and those connected to China’s National
University of Defense Technology, which is domineered by China’s
leading military wing, the Central Military Commission. The Financial
Times pointed out that one of the papers depicted a new AI modality “to
recreate detailed environmental maps by analyzing human faces, which
experts say could have clear applications for surveillance and
censorship.�

Furthermore, Microsoft enables the CCP to censor Bing, its search
engine in China, so that it can continue to operate in the large
market. By contrast, Google yanked its search engine a decade ago over
censorship woes and in ensuing years has continued to pull various
search and cloud efforts -- including the development of potential
cloud services for China. Bing is currently the only international
search engine with a slice of the market share in the country.

Continued:

https://www.foxnews.com/tech/microso...iktok-purchase