The Trump administration is considering banning a variety of Chinese tech companies from operating in the United States due to privacy concerns, according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“We are now evaluating each instance where we believe that U.S. citizens’ data that they have on their phones or in their system or in their healthcare records. We want to make sure that the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t have a way to easily access that,” Pompeo told reporters Wednesday at the State Department.
Pompeo confirmed earlier this week that the administration might ban Beijing-based TikTok, a popular social media app that China hawks regard as a Chinese Communist portal into American cell phones. His latest comments raised the likelihood that President Trump’s administration will follow India in banning dozens of Chinese companies over national security fears.
[Related: Trump says he’s ‘looking at’ banning TikTok]
“We have been engaged in a constant evaluation about ensuring that we protect the privacy of American citizens and their information as it transits,” Pompeo said. “So this doesn’t relate to any one particular business or company, but rather to American national security.”
Indian officials struck a similar note last month when they announced a ban of TikTok and 58 other Chinese phone apps on the grounds that the companies “engaged in activities which is prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity” of India.
Pompeo’s statement comes on the heels of an FBI warning that Chinese officials are stealing vast quantities of data on private American citizens in order to accelerate their research into cutting-edge technologies and identify potential targets for espionage or recruitment.
“China has made becoming an artificial intelligence world leader a priority, and these kinds of thefts feed right into China’s development of artificial intelligence tools,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday. “Compounding the threat, the data China stole is of obvious value as they attempt to identify people for secret intelligence gathering. On that front, China is using social media platforms—the same ones Americans use to stay connected or find jobs—to identify people with access to our government’s sensitive information and then target those people to try to steal it.”
Pompeo linked the review of the social media apps to his parallel effort to prevent Huawei and other Chinese telecommunications companies from striking deals to build the next-generation 5G wireless technology infrastructure in Western countries.
“We have a big project,” he said. “The infrastructure of this next hundred years must be a communications infrastructure that is based on a Western ideal of private property and protection of private citizens’ information in a transparent way. That is not the model that Chinese Communist Party software and hardware companies are engaged in.”
