Pompeo says Trump days away from taking action against TikTok

WASHINGTON:  US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said President Donald Trump is days away from taking strict action against the popular Chinese-owned video sharing app TikTok to protect US national security.

He said TikTok and other Chinese software companies operating in the US, such as WeChat, feed personal data on American citizens directly to the Chinese Communist Party.

For years the US has put up with this because Americans felt "we're having fun with it," Pompeo said.

"President Trump has said, 'Enough,' and we're going to fix it," Pompeo told Fox News.

"And so he will take action in the coming days with respect to a broad array of national security risks that are presented by software connected to the Chinese Communist Party," he added.

Pompeo said the data that companies like TikTok are gleaning about Americans "could be their facial recognition pattern; it could be information about their residence, their phone numbers, their friends, who they're connected to."

Earlier, in another ominous US warning to the Chinese-owned app, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said TikTok should be sold or blocked in the US.

TikTok, Mnuchin said, simply "cannot exist as it does."

Mnuchin did not comment directly on Trump's threat on Friday to bar the wildly popular video-sharing app.

The secretary recalled that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States — which he chairs — is reviewing TikTok, which is especially popular with young audiences who create and watch its short-form videos and has an estimated one billion users worldwide.

But in one of many fronts in the increasingly poisonous US-Chinese relationship, US officials have said it could be a tool for Chinese intelligence. TikTok denies any such suggestion.

"I will say publicly that the entire committee agrees that TikTok cannot stay in the current format because it risks sending back information on 100 million Americans," Mnuchin said Sunday on ABC.

Mnuchin said he has spoken to leaders of Congress including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the top Democrat in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, about what to do with TikTok's operations in the US.

"We agree there needs to be a change -- force a sale or block the app. Everybody agrees it can't exist as it does," Mnuchin said.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that negotiations for Microsoft to buy the US operations of TikTok, owned by Chinese internet giant ByteDance, are on hold after Trump threatened to bar the app.

TikTok defended itself on Saturday, with its general manager for the US, Vanessa Pappas, telling users that the company was working to give them "the safest app," amid US concerns over data security.

"We're not planning on going anywhere," Pappas said in a message released on the app.