As of Tuesday, the White House has officially decided to stop transactions that go through eight different Chinese software apps which include Alipay, a certain payment platform that is owned by Ant Group, and WeChat, another app platform that is owned by Chinese company Tencent. The executive order was officially signed on Tuseday prohibiting the transactions with these applications.
Apps banned through the executive order
According to the story by The New York Times, the executive order was officially issued some time late Tuesday and will bar any of the transactions along with the "persons that develop or control" all the apps of Alipay, QQ Wallet, SHAREit, CamScanner, Tencent QQ, WeChat Pay, VMate, and even WPS Office as well as their subsidiaries after a certain period of just 45 days.
In the official order, it was stated that China had actually been using certain "bulk data collection" in order to advance its own economic as well as national security agenda. He stated that the targeted apps actually put all of the Americans at risk.
The supposed reason behind the executive order
The order stated that the United States has actually assessed that the total number of the Chinese conducted software apps had automatically captured a huge amount of information coming from millions of different users all from the United States. This also includes sensitive personally identifiable information as well as private information. During this time, action has to be taken in order to address the given threat that is posed by these particular Chinese connected software apps.
This particular executive order is known as the latest escalation between the United States and China. Recently, there was also disputes against certain Chinese-owned social media services. This said that they had provided conduit for actual Chinese espionage and that they pose a huge threat to the safety of the American public.
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New order follows two earlier ones
As of last year, there has been a lot of heat going on against two popular Chinese-owned apps, both TikTok and WeChat. These two apps have already been widely used in the United States by celebrities, students, professionals, and almost everyone else.
According to The Verge, this new order actually follows two earlier ones that were made in August that had tried to ultimately ban transactions made with ByteDance through blocking out the popular TikTok, and WeChat. However, the judge decided to block the WeChat ban back in September and once again back in October. This was while the judge had granted a preliminary injunction that was stopping the TikTok ban some time back in December.
Should the US be successful in banning these particular apps, the article then notes that this could result in a pretty big struggle especially for those Chinese American families who use those particular apps in order for them to communicate online. The ban could also directly affect those working with an international team as sometimes, these are more convenient ways for them to communicate.
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This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Urian Buenconsejo
