The President of the United States, Donald Trump, signed an executive order this Friday approving a period of 90 days for ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, to end its operations in the country and dispose of the data.
Trump accuses the application of exposing Americans to the risk of data theft or propaganda by the Chinese-origin company.
“There is real evidence that makes me think that ByteDance … could take measures that threaten to harm the national security of the United States,” the president insisted.
For its part, the company that owns the application has repeated that TikTok has reached more than 100 million Americans because it is the home of “entertainment, self-expression and connection.”
“We are committed to continuing to bring joy to families and meaningful careers for those who believe in our platform for many years,” the company has transmitted in a statement, collected by the newspaper ‘Politico’.
Trump signed an executive order last week to ban “any” transaction with ByteDance within 45 days. Specifically, the order prohibits “any transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States with ByteDance or its subsidiaries,” according to the published text.
As explained by the president, TikTok automatically captures “large amounts of information” from its users, including information about the Internet and other network activities, such as location and browsing data and search histories.
Thus, “this data collection threatens to allow the Communist Party of China (CCP) access to personal and proprietary information of Americans” something that would potentially allow “to track the locations of federal employees and contractors, build records of personal information for blackmail and corporate espionage “.
