Good morning.
It's Thursday, December 19th.
I'm Shemitah Basu.
This is Apple News Today.
On today's show, why some colleges are offering free tuition to a broader swath of students.
Trump comes out strongly against a bipartisan bill to prevent a government shutdown at the end of the week
and the messy, lucrative business of breakups.
But first, TikTok has just one month left to respond to an ultimatum from
either sell to an approved buyer and divest from its China based parent company ByteDance, or be banned in the US
for the tens of millions of American users.
It could be the end of an era for the app, which has built a reputation for curating seemingly tailor made content just for you here.
Here's how Lauren Feiner at the Verge put it.
A lot of people feel like the algorithm knows what they want to see,
has like just the right amount of randomness to keep them interested and that's really powerful.
Lawmakers have warned for a long time that the app poses national security risks, citing policies in China
that allow the government to secretly request data from companies and citizens, which TikTok claims has never happened to them.
Forbes says they experienced TikTok's far reaching ability to spy on users firsthand
when the app improperly gained access to some of their journalists, IP addresses and user data.
Those reporters were tracked as part of a covert surveillance campaign.
ByteDance confirmed that it happened and fired the employees responsible.