TikTok, WeChat banned in US starting Sunday

Washington: The Commerce Department will roll out a ban of transactions in the US using TikTok and WeChat starting Sunday.

“At the President’s direction, we have taken significant action to combat China’s malicious collection of American citizens’ personal data, while promoting our national values, democratic rules-based norms, and aggressive enforcement of US laws and regulations,” Ross said in a prepared statement.

The government said its order, previously announced by Trump in August, will “combat China’s malicious collection of American citizens’ personal data.”

The government previously said that using and downloading WeChat to communicate won’t be a banned transaction, although messaging on the app “could be directly or indirectly impaired” by the ban, and people who use it for messaging won’t 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.