Amazon orders employees to remove TikTok from phones, then backtracks

I hate that this is happening with our current administration. Any attempt by companies to ban TikTok will be overreach, but the very nature of who is issuing a national ban on the app has the potential to politicize it in ways that undermine the issues that TikTok, and Chinese political issues with capital investment in western industry, represent.

It's not that the US is better in terms of wanting data, but at least our companies have a tendency to resist government mandate. I'm slightly more comfortable with my data being used for economic purposes than for intelligence, but both are very disturbing, like picking how you're murdered. In China, you either fork over the information or don't get to exist. The concept of "free enterprise" typically also means the government has a stake in your company, for better or worse. The most egregious state action in the US is data filtering through national infrastructure, and current legislative threats.

Well this is bizarre. They've updated the story:

Amazon says that it will not ask employees to remove popular social video-sharing app TikTok from their mobile devices, despite sending an email calling for workers to delete the app earlier on Friday.

As first reported by The New York Times on Friday, Amazon asked employees to remove TikTok from their mobile devices, citing security risks. An Amazon spokesperson told The Verge on Friday that the email was “sent in error.”

Lol, wut? How exactly was it "sent in error"? You don't write up an email with that kind of specificity in error. I wonder if China threatened them so they backed down, or something else like that?

I can imagine that Bezos is a little paranoid about stuff like this after what happened with the Saudi's hacking his phone to eventually get to Khashoggi. But the reversal seems more odd to me.