US wants to ban the TikTok app

Some US senators want the popular TikTok app banned in the country, or at least investigated for censorship. India has already banned it.

The statement came from former CIA official and current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. On Monday, the US government official publicly said that the United States was considering banning some Chinese apps, including TikTok, over alleged data and information sharing with the Chinese government. "I don't want to get ahead of the president, but it's something we're looking at," Pompeo said in a Fox News interview.

In response, TikTok spokespeople say they have data storage facilities in the United States and Singapore, for example, although it is far from clear whether all American users' photographs, videos and usernames are stored there.

The company behind the app of the moment is still trying to ease tensions with India, which banned it last week along with 58 other Chinese apps. To that end, the app's creators say they can store all Indian users' data on a server in India, something the company said a year ago it would build but never delivered.

US senators have been raising concerns about how TikTok stores user data. They say they are worried about a Chinese law that requires domestic companies to support and cooperate with intelligence services and agencies controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

Donald Trump recently experienced some of TikTok's power first-hand: thousands of the app's users bought tickets to his Tulsa rally and then did not use them. The result? A terrible outcome for the US president, with half the venue completely empty. This could be the perfect excuse to move ahead with a ban.

TikTok is currently the most visible symbol of China catching up with the US in the use of new technology. To give you an idea of the comparison between what each country has: Whatsapp and WeChat, Snap and Instagram. But now China has TikTok, which is even bigger than all of these. The problem is that it was not created by a company from Brazil, Russia or France. It came from China, a country that is extremely strong in this field globally.

Huawei is the more mature counterpart to the app, and it too is suffering from US sanctions. A Reuters report says TikTok is expected to leave its Hong Kong offices within days, after the Chinese government introduced new national security laws for the city.

One major problem with banning TikTok is the likely impact on Silicon Valley's power and money. Sequoia Capital of Menlo Park, California, invested more than $100 million in one of the companies behind it, ByteDance, although it did so through its Chinese unit.

It is also worth considering that much larger companies, including Intel, have maintained relationships with Huawei and failed in their attempts to persuade Washington to lift restrictions on the telecommunications equipment maker. We can assume Silicon Valley will face the same outcome.

India's TikTok ban, meanwhile, comes as the country is locked in a heated territorial dispute with China over land not far from Tibet. The conflict led many Indians to stop importing Chinese technology, resulting in a small-business boycott of Made in China products. Later, activists targeted one of the app's buildings in India.

The Indian government then banned dozens of other apps from the country's app stores. In this geopolitical dispute between the United States of America and China, we will see what Washington does next; banning Chinese apps could be just the first step.