The US House Foreign Affairs Committee voted along party lines (24-16 R) to give the Biden administration the authority to ban TikTok. This represents the most far reaching restriction on any social networking app in the United States.

The TikTok controversy began in the Trump administration when he was personally leading the charge to have the app sold to another US company. 100 million US users use TikTok and it has proven to be sieve for personal data. ByteDance is owned by Chinese entrepreneur, Zhang Yiming, and specializes in delivering the most entertaining videos to users by using AI to mine personal preferences.

More than 30 states have banned TikTok from being installed on state-owned smartphones. Canada has also banned the app from being install on government phones. As of yesterday, the Biden administration has given US government agencies 24 hours to remove the app from fed-owned smartphones.

This latest move grants Biden the authority to issue an all-out ban. Which is not clearly understood. Does that mean he can ban the app from all App Stores? The Panel’s move also gives Biden the authority to ban any entity that may transfer personal data to any entity under Chinese influence.

The Republican Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul, said, “anyone with TikTok downloaded on their device has given the CCP (Communist Party of China) a backdoor to all their personal information. It’s a spy balloon into their phone.”

The Chinese government and the US are locked in the fiercest geopolitical competition since the Cold War. The US has banned technology companies and arrested spies operating on US soil. There’s more to come from all this.