President Trump in an executive order has called the wide use of Chinese apps a “national emergency”, in what is a direct assault at TikTok. The executive order carries his threat to ban TikTok unless it is acquired by an American company.
“The spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. At this time, action must be taken to address the threat posed by one mobile application in particular, TikTok,” the executive order reads.
President Trump is not alone in taking up arms against TikTok. Some hours prior, the US Senate had voted unanimously to ban TikTok from all government-owned devices.
The senate order prohibits “any transaction by any person” with ByteDance in 45 days. The ban also prohibits transactions with ByteDance’s subsidiary. This could mean that the app also faces a ban from Apple and Google app stores in the US.
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The ban takes effect in 45 days. White House reporter Andrew Feinberg tweeted the executive order, showing a similar order against China’s WeChat.
INBOX: @realDonaldTrump has signed an executive order to ban TikTok in 45 days. pic.twitter.com/1zR4HgCPVj
— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) August 7, 2020
The US concern is that TikTok and WeChat collect data from US users on behalf of the Chinese government. There is also the notion that companies are unable to reject requests to access their data from the Chinese government.
Experts say a China 2017 law requires its companies and citizens to comply with all matters of national security. This effectively makes the government requests constitutional.
“TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories.
“This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage,” the order reads.
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