NEW YORK President Donald Trump plans to take action on a what he sees as a broad array of national security risks presented by software connected to the Chinese Communist Party, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday.
Pompeos remarks followed reports that Microsoft is in advanced talks to buy the U.S. operations of TikTok, which has been a source of national security and censorship concerns for the Trump administration.
These Chinese software companies doing business in the United States, whether its TikTok or WeChat there are countless more … are feeding data directly to the Chinese Communist Party, their national security apparatus, Pompeo said on FOX News Channels Sunday Morning Futures. Could be their facial recognition patterns. It could be information about their residence, their phone numbers, their friends, who theyre connected to. Those those are the issues that President Trump has made clear were going to take care of.
Trump had said on Friday that he would soon ban TikTok in the United States. A federal committee is reviewing whether that’s possible, and its members agree that TikTok cannot remain in the U.S. in its current form, because it “risks sending back information on 100 million Americans, said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
We all agree there has to be a change…everybody agrees it cant exist as it does,” Mnuchin said Sunday on ABC News This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
As speculation grew over a ban or sale of the social media’s U.S. business, TikTok posted a video on Saturday saying: Were not planning on going anywhere.
TikTok’s catchy videos and ease of use has made it popular, and it says it has tens of millions of users in the U.S. and hundreds of millions globally. Its parent company, Bytedance Ltd., launched TikTok in 2017. It bought Musical.ly, a video service popular with teens in the U.S. and Europe, and combined the two. It has a similar service, Douyin, for users in China.
But TikTok’s Chinese ownership has raised concern about the potential for sharing user data with Chinese officials as well as censorship of videos critical of the Chinese government. TikTok says it does not censor videos and it would not give the Chinese government access to U.S. user data.
The President, when he makes his decision, will make sure that everything we have done drives us as close to zero risk for the American people, Pompeo said. Thats the mission set that he laid out for all of us when we get — we began to evaluate this now several months back. Were closing in on a solution. And I think you will see the presidents announcement shortly.
The debate over TikTok parallels a broader U.S. security crackdown on Chinese companies, including telecom providers Huawei and ZTE. The Trump administration has ordered that the U.S. stop buying equipment from those providers to be used in U.S. networks. Trump has also tried to steer allies away from Huawei over concerns that the Chinese government has access to its data, which Huawei denies.
___
Follow Cathy Bussewitz on Twitter at www.twitter.com/cbussewitz
___
AP Business Writers Anne D’Innocenzio and Tali Arbel contributed to this report.
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Comments
0 comment