I believe there is a legal concept at play here. If a company has an office - a physical presence - within the country, then it has what is called “mind and management” in the country. The mind and management doctrine gives the company certain rights within Canada that presumably the security folks don’t want them to have.
The public will probably never find out the scope of ByteDance’s operations in Canada for the Chinese government, but if it follows the same arc as other Chinese operations in Canada, I expect it is far more pervasive and frightening than one might expect. This isn’t about the app. This is about the offices.
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