Mr. President, just say “No” on TikTok

President Trump has commendably intervened to prevent a Chinese application called TikTok from continuing to vacuum up personal and other sensitive data from American customers. In response to his insistence that the app had to be sold to a U.S. company by September 15^th, its owner, Bytedance, reached a last-minute agreement with Oracle.

The trouble is there’s no way to be sure that Chinese Communist Party security services and the companies that support them would actually stop exploiting this app for malevolent purposes – even if Oracle actually owned it and could fully bring to bear that corporation’s considerable technical skills for the purpose. But that’s not the case. So, China can still operate to TikTok users’ detriment – and our nation’s.

President Trump is expected to be briefed by his experts today on the inadequacy of this arrangement. Just say “No,” Mr. President.

This is Frank Gaffney.