US banning WeChat, TikTok downloads for national security
WASHINGTON โ The Commerce Department will roll out a ban of transactions in the U.S. using TikTok and WeChat starting Sunday. The order Friday was put into place, according to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, to โcombat Chinaโs malicious collection of American citizens' personal data.โAug. 14, 2020: Trump orders Chinese owner of TikTok to sell US assetsThe government previously said that using and downloading the app to communicate wonโt be a banned transaction, although messaging on the app โcould be directly or indirectly impairedโ by the ban, and people who use it for messaging wonโt be subject to penalties. Some security experts have raised concerns that ByteDance Ltd., the Chinese company that owns TikTok, would maintain access to information on the 100 million TikTok users in the United States, creating a security risk. Read the Commerce Department release here.