There are also worries over China using access to steal personal data or blackmail U.S. If Beijing made a request, TikTok says, it would not cooperate.īut Baker says if the Chinese government sought data on Americans, it could force TikTok's parent company to comply.Īssuming China will not ask 'is not a prudent move,' he said, noting that government officials fear Beijing officials could in theory build a database on American consumers to tap for micro-targeting advertising or disinformation campaigns. and that it has never turned over any information on U.S. TikTok says that its data on American users is mostly stored in the U.S. TikTok rethinks corporate structure in the U.S. Officials at TikTok declined to comment on any of the possible enforcement actions aimed at the company. TikTok could also be added to the Commerce Department's blacklist, known as 'the Entity List.' The administration has placed Chinese telecom giant Huawei on it, only to grant several reprieves since.Ī third option under consideration by the Trump administration and some lawmakers in Congress is to challenge ByteDance's acquisition of American lip-syncing app Musical.ly in November 2017, a merger that set the stage for TikTok to become one of the most popular apps in the world. Eventually, that would make managing the app untenable. And updates to the app would not be sent to the tens of millions of Americans who already have it on their phones. In other words, it would not be possible to find TikTok in app stores. No American can enter into a transaction to put them into their app store,' Baker said.

'No American can give them advertising money.

If the act is invoked, financial transactions between Americans or U.S.-based financial institutions and TikTok would be illegal and punishable with hefty civil fines or criminal prosecution. 'And now that same sanction might be used against TikTok.' 'When we talk about sanctions against Russian oligarchs and kleptocrats, well, the sanctions are that no American can do business with them,' said Stewart Baker, the former general counsel at the National Security Agency. Leading technology policy and national security experts say, if President Trump is determined to run TikTok out of the U.S., he is most likely to issue an executive order declaring it a national security threat under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, an authority that branched out from the century-old Trading with the Enemy Act. And while TikTok has taken steps to distance itself from its Beijing parent company, both the Trump administration and some Republicans and Democrats in Congress fear the Chinese Communist Party could use TikTok as a tool to spy on Americans. TikTok is owned by the Chinese technology giant ByteDance. The Trump administration is considering ways to push the video-sharing app, beloved by teens and 20-somethings, out of the U.S. TikTok is contemplating ways to distance itself from its Chinese parent company as threats from Washington grow louder.Ĭongress this week advanced legislation to block federal employees from using TikTok on government-issued devices. Officials fear the app could be used as a spy tool. The White House and Congress are increasingly clamping down on TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing app that is a sensation among teenagers and 20-somethings.

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