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Everyone’s a security risk

Good morning! This Tuesday, ByteDance pauses its IPO indefinitely, Twitter reopens its headquarters, and the most anticipated tech book of the summer is out.
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Things just never seem to get less complicated for ByteDance, do they? Zhang Yiming and his team barely got to take a deep breath after months of threats from the Trump White House before it had to figure out how to avoid the ire of the Chinese government.
ByteDance scuttled its IPO plans earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported, after Beijing regulators urged the company to look into its data security.
Others are following ByteDance's lead, too. Ximalaya, Keep, LinkDoc and others have all reportedly delayed or canceled planned IPOs. And don't forget about Ant Group, which had its own IPO put on ice indefinitely.
But there's an odd dichotomy here. The U.S. IPO market is absurdly hot, and companies are rushing to go public in practically any way they can because money's free and stocks only go up. (Or so it seems!) But in China, where there are so many huge private companies that investors are scrambling to get a piece of, a chill has come over the market.
And China's not just making one-off decisions, either. The Cyberspace Administration of China has been tightening its rules and upping its enforcement across the board. Most recently, it's pushing for a rule that would require any internet company with more than a million users to get a cybersecurity review before going public abroad. That would cover … a lot of companies.
Privacy, user data, national security, malicious foreign governments: It's not all that different from what the White House says it's worried about. In 2021, everybody's a security risk.
In 2020, U.S. merchants sold over $54 billion worth of products to Chinese customers on Alibaba's e-commerce platforms, which rely on Alipay to facilitate the transactions. The year prior to the pandemic, Chinese tourists in the U.S. engaged in 800,000 transactions using the Alipay App, for sales valued at $232 million.
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Elizabeth Warren wants lawmakers to investigate Amazon's mask sales:
Sundar Pichai thinks AI is one of humanity's greatest feats:
Elon Musk told attorney Randy Baron that the lawyer is a "bad person" during the Tesla CEO's SolarCity testimony:
Some Google employees think the company is too big to handle. Here's what one anonymous senior employee said:
The Unite union is accusing Amazon of "price gouging" during the height of the pandemic:
On Protocol: Microsoft is buying RiskIQ. The deal is Microsoft's latest move to beef up security as companies continue to face cyberattacks.
Twitter reopened two offices. Employees can head back to New York and San Francisco offices if they want.
Kirstine Stewart is Pex's first chief revenue officer. Stewart served as Twitter's vice president of media up until 2016, and she most recently led new media at the World Economic Forum.
Don McGuire is Qualcomm's next senior VP and CMO. He's been with the company since 2016, and his predecessor will stick around until she retires later this year.
Facebook tapped Manar Waheed to lead its civil rights law unit. She previously served as a counsel for the ACLU and worked on immigration policy under Obama.
On Protocol: Blake Masters wants to be an Arizona senator. The venture capitalist is getting support from Peter Thiel, who donated millions to his campaign.
Tesco's Eve Henrikson will lead Uber's delivery service in Europe. Before Tesco, she worked on ecommerce at Ted Baker.
Ian Plunkett is taking over global policy communications at Coinbase. Previously he held the same role at Twitter.
New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang's new book, "An Ugly Truth," is out today, and the Times reports that people inside Facebook were nervous about its release. And for good reason: It takes a hard look at all the scandals facing the company during the Trump presidency — everything from the manipulated Nancy Pelosi video to the Capitol riots — giving readers a play-by-play of what was happening on the inside using conversations with more than 400 sources.
And considering things didn't look that great from the outside, it's no wonder employees were nervous.
In 2020, U.S. merchants sold over $54 billion worth of products to Chinese customers on Alibaba's e-commerce platforms, which rely on Alipay to facilitate the transactions. The year prior to the pandemic, Chinese tourists in the U.S. engaged in 800,000 transactions using the Alipay App, for sales valued at $232 million.
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