The United States wants to ban the Chinese short video-making app TikTok across the country, and the House Foreign Affairs Committee will vote next month on bills to do it.
Reports indicate that the bill will grant the White House the authority to impose a ban on TikTok due to more important national security considerations.
The US House of Representatives put a ban on the Chinese app last month for mobile devices issued bythem. The House directed employees to remove TikTok from all mobile devices.
A spokeswoman for TikTok claimed in an interview with South China Morning Post that a complete ban on the app would be”piecemeal approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broad industry issues like data security, privacy and online harms”.
“We hope that lawmakers will focus their energies on efforts to address those issues holistically, rather than pretending that banning a single service would solve any of the problems they’re concerned about or make Americans any safer,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
TikTok has already been banned on government-issued devices by local administrations in 19 US states.
The Chinese short video-making app and the US Justice Department are currently discussing a deal to allay worries about national security.
As per earlier reports, At least two US journalists’ data, as well as the data of a “small number” of other people connected to them, was accessed by China-based ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.
In response to a Forbes article that claimed the app planned to conduct out such monitoring, TikTok denied the claim that it used particular location data to track certain Americans in October of last year.
In order to allay worries that staff stationed in China would have access to American data, TikTok said in June that it has begun routing US user data through Oracle.
TikTok and several other Chinese applications were banned in India in 2020 for allegedly exchanging user data with China.
