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Biden has a new plan for TikTok

Good morning! This Thursday, Biden takes on Trump's TikTok executive order, Facebook is working on a smartwatch, Marqeta had a big first day on the market, and please stop flaunting your bitcoin.
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It's been less than a year since President Trump signed a series of executive orders aimed at shutting down WeChat and strong-arming TikTok into a sale. The knee-jerk orders kicked off a frenzied bidding war between giants like Microsoft and Oracle and nearly torpedoed TikTok's business before being blocked by the courts.
Those Trump-era measures were officially laid to rest Wednesday by President Biden, who revoked them in an executive order of his own. Biden's order also attempts to actually answer the question that was underlying the TikTok debacle all along: What should the country do about Americans' data getting into foreign adversaries' hands?
Biden's order takes a different approach. It directs key members of his cabinet to conduct a review and issue recommendations on protecting the U.S. against "harm from the unrestricted sale of, transfer of, or access to United States persons' sensitive data" to foreign adversaries.
Biden's trying to define the risks and develop some overarching solutions. It's a slower approach than shutting down two of the most popular apps in the world, to be sure. But it's one that could have implications for companies far beyond TikTok.
It's clear this order is targeted at China. But these are questions that governments around the world are asking about the overseas transfer of data.
I think Ashkan Soltani, former chief technology officer at the Federal Trade Commission, put it best when he called Biden's order further evidence of the "web of (mis)trust" that exists between countries — and companies — and is enveloping the world. "Europe doesn't trust data transfers to the US ... US doesn't trust data transfers to China/Russia. Apple doesn't trust Facebook," he wrote on Twitter Wednesday. "Welcome to the Internet."
It's not just Amazon employees who experience the benefit of increasing their starting wage to at least $15 an hour — a recent study from the University of California-Berkeley and Brandeis University found that when Amazon raised wages, the average hourly wage in the surrounding area rose by 4.7%.
On Protocol: Stacey Abrams and Lara Hodgson started a fintech company to solve a problem they and other startups kept having:
Jason Kilar shook up Hollywood, and now some rivals (like this anonymous exec) are gleefully watching his fall:
All those tweets about your crypto winnings are a security risk, Coinbase's Matt Muller said:
Carolyn Everson left Facebook. She's been at the company for more than a decade, and was hugely influential in the business as its head of global ad sales.
Matt Furlong is the new CEO at GameStop, and Mike Recupero is the new CFO. Both are former Amazon execs, who will be tasked with turning the company into … well, something like Amazon.
Noom hired a bunch of new executives: Sean Foster is the new CMO, Angela Crossman is the new head of people, and Firdaus Bhathena is the new GM of health care.
Allen Denison is leaving Apple. He's been at the company since 1997 — and at NeXT before that — most recently working on developer technologies for the company.
Valo Health is getting SPAC'd. Its merger with a Khosla Ventures SPAC values the company at about $2.8 billion.
Marqeta hit the public market and had a big first day. Its price jumped 20% at the beginning of trading and stayed up throughout trading.
Be honest: You miss your desk phone a little. You might not have had one in years (and if you're new to the workforce, you might never have had one), but there was something nice about the big handset, the buttons and the feeling like every time you picked up the phone it was An Event.
Well, Zoom's trying to bring it back. It's working with Poly and others on "Zoom Phone Appliances," which would bake the app into a desk phone with a touchscreen. It's mostly meant for audio calls, sure (and we could all use more camera-free calls, right?), but you can even get one with a webcam that sticks out of the top. It's like a 1950s videophone dream come to life. And it means instead of the awkward wave goodbye on Zoom, you can now end a call by slamming the handset down. Isn't that just better?
Kimberly thinks Amazon is "setting a good example for not only Florida, but every other state where the minimum wage is below $15/hr." That's because she has seen the difference $15/hr has made for her, her family, and her community.
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