The Trump administration will remain wary of popular video sharing app TikTok even if Microsoft and other US tech companies bought into the Chinese firm, White House adviser Peter Navarro said on Monday, APA reports citing Sputnik.
"Microsoft through its Bing search engine... now operates in China through Skype calls that effectively are enablers of Chinese censorship surveillance and monitoring. Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco [and] other American companies in the tech land help China build its great firewall, which is used basically... to imprison Chinese citizens", Navarro told Fox News when asked if the deal should go through.
"Can we trust any company that operates in China, has servers [and] software in China, to protect your children? That's a question I think that needs to be asked", he added.
Navarro further elaborated that such deals do not automatically eliminate the threat of China’s surveillance on all things American.
China's civil and military fusion requires any foreign company operating on Chinese soil to give them their data, he said. So the question, Navarro added, is whether it is prudent to sell TikTok to any company with operations in China that might be compromised and thereby "get us into the same problem we have now".
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