Donald Trump cites India's concerns to ban Chinese app TikTok

US President Donald Trump’s order to ban US transactions with Chinese owners of short video-sharing app TikTok and messenger app WeChat cited India’s decision to purge the two applications earlier in June. The US restriction on the transactions will kick in after 45 days, mid-September.

“The risks are real,” the presidential directive said, accusing the mobile applications of capturing vast swaths of information from its users that may potentially be accessed by the Chinese Communist Party. The data captured by TikTok could potentially allow China to track locations of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage.

The US President went on to cite restrictions on use of TikTok on federal government phones by the US armed forces, homeland security and the transportation security administration.

Then he turned to India’s ban on Chinese mobile applications to build the case for his own set of restrictions.

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“The Government of India recently banned the use of TikTok and other Chinese mobile applications throughout the country; in a statement, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology asserted that they were “stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers which have locations outside India,” President Trump said.

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