“You have 100 million TikTok users in the country or something,” Sununu said. “Our job is to make sure folks know that if they’re choosing to use TikTok, they’re choosing to hand their personal information over to the Chinese government, effectively. So we need to make it very clear about what is being transferred, what information is being made available.”
TikTok said the warning from the Biden administration came in a letter from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which is conducting a security review of the application.
Separately, Congress is considering legislation that would give the president the ability to ban TikTok. Former President Donald Trump attempted a ban but was blocked by the courts.
President Joe Biden has prohibited the application’s use on federal devices. Government agencies have until the end of March to remove the application, with some exceptions.
The White House declined on Thursday to confirm the letter that TikTok said it received.
National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby told reporters that Biden has national security concerns about TikTok, as evidenced by the ban on government devices.
“I’m not going to get ahead of the CFIUS review,” Kirby said of a national ban. “The president has already made very clear his concerns over that particular app, TikTok, on the use of government devices, because we have legitimate national security concerns with respect to data integrity that we need to observe.”
Biden’s warning:TikTok says Biden administration is threatening US ban if Chinese owners don’t sell stakes.
TikTok ban “doesn’t seem practical,” Sununu says
Sununu signed an executive order banning TikTok on government devices in New Hampshire in mid-December. He said Thursday that the risk for malware and the potential seizure of sensitive information warrants a ban on government devices.
Explaining his opposition to a ban on TikTok on Americans’ personal devices, he said, “I’m not a big believer in, on the personal level, of government banning a lot of things. That’s not my way of doing things.”
He said that sometimes government bans are necessary. “But if we’re going to say the government’s now going to tell 100 million people they have to delete TikTok off their devices, that doesn’t seem practical to me.””I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. But I’m a free market guy… and I do believe in individual responsibility, even when I disagree with your individual choices.”
