“President Trump said, ‘Enough’ and we’ll fix it,” Pompeo said. (File)
Washington:
President Donald Trump is days away from announcing forceful action against popular Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok to protect U.S. national security, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Sunday.
He said TikTok and other Chinese software companies operating in the United States, such as WeChat, transmit personal data about American citizens directly to the Chinese Communist Party.
For years, the United States put up with this because Americans felt “we’re having fun with it,” Pompeo said.
“President Trump said, ‘Enough’ and we’ll fix it,” Pompeo told Fox News.
“And so it will take action in the coming days regarding a wide range of national security risks that are presented by software connected to the Chinese Communist Party,” he added.
Pompeo said that the data that companies like TikTok glean about Americans “could be their facial recognition model; it could be information about their residence, their phone numbers, their friends, who they’re connected to.”
Previously, in another ominous US warning to the China-owned app, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said TikTok should be sold or blocked in the US.
TikTok, Mnuchin said, “just cannot exist as it is.”
Mnuchin did not directly comment on Trump’s threat on Friday to ban the hugely popular video-sharing app.
The secretary recalled that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States – which he chairs – is reviewing TikTok, which is particularly popular with the young audience who create and watch its short videos and have around one billion users worldwide.
But on one of many fronts in the increasingly poisonous relationship between the United States and China, U.S. officials have said it could be a tool for Chinese intelligence. TikTok denies such a suggestion.
“I will say publicly that the entire committee agrees that TikTok cannot stay in the current format because it risks returning information on 100 million Americans,” Mnuchin said on ABC Sunday.
Mnuchin said he spoke with Congressional leaders including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Senior Democrat Chuck Schumer about what to do with TikTok’s operations in the United States. .
“We agree that there has to be a change – force a sale or block the app. Everyone agrees that it cannot exist as it exists,” Mnuchin said.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that negotiations for Microsoft to buy the U.S. operations of TikTok, owned by Chinese internet giant ByteDance, are on hold after Trump threatened to ban the app.
TikTok defended itself on Saturday, with its chief executive for the United States, Vanessa Pappas, telling users the company was working hard to give them “the safest app,” amid U.S. concerns over the safety of users. data.
“We don’t plan to go anywhere,” Pappas said in a post on the app.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
