• This weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump said he wanted to ban the app from the country;
• TikTok has been facing growing concerns over privacy and data security in several countries, such as the U.S. and, more recently, Australia.

The South China Morning Post reported this Sunday morning that TikTok could become totally independent from its Chinese owner ByteDance to continue operating overseas, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Also according to this source, despite reports on Microsoft’s interest in buying a significant part of the company, ByteDance founder, called Zhang Yiming and other investors in the company are not keen on selling TikTok to the U.S. big tech.

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This weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump said he wanted to ban the app from the country. TikTok has been facing growing concerns over privacy and data security in several countries, such as the U.S. and, more recently, Australia.

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Trump stressed that he can do this through an executive order or emergency economic powers, removing TikTok from Apple and Google’s app stores, for example.

Bytedance launched TikTok in 2017. The app has grown more popular during the pandemic, reaching the milestone of 2 billion downloads in April, according to Sensor Tower. In February, when the app hit a record of 113 million downloads, Brazil was the fastest-growing market for TikTok, just behind India.

Last week, according to Reuters, ByteDance has valued TikTok at $50 billion.