US considers nationwide TikTok ban due to security concerns

Washington: The House Foreign Affairs Committee will vote on a bill to completely block the Chinese short-video platform TikTok next month. The US intends to outlaw TikTok nationwide.

Reportedly, the law will give the White House the authority to impose a ban on TikTok due to more pressing national security issues.

The Chinese short-form video creation tool was prohibited from being used on mobile devices by the US House of Representatives last month. The House directed employees to remove TikTok from all mobile devices.

A TikTok spokesperson told South China Morning Post that a total ban of the app is a "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.

Local administrations in 19 US states have already banned TikTok on government issued-devices.

TikTok is currently negotiating a deal with the US Justice Department to resolve national security concerns.

Earlier reports claimed that China-based ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, accessed the data of at least two US journalists and a "small number" of other people connected to them.

In October last year, TikTok denied that it used specific location data to track certain U.S. individuals, pushing back against a Forbes report that alleged the app was planning on carrying out such monitoring.

In June, TikTok said it started routing US user data through Oracle to appease concerns that China-based employees could access U.S. information.

In 2020, India banned TikTok and several other Chinese apps for allegedly sharing user data with China.

With inputs from IANS