Pompeo says Trump to take broad action on Chinese software

President Donald Trump plans to take action on a what he sees as a bro array of national security risks presented by software connected to Chinese Communist Party, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Sunday.

Pompeo's remarks followed reports that Microsoft is in vanced talks to buy US operations of TikTok, which has been a source of national security and censorship concerns for Trump ministration.

“se Chinese software companies doing business in United States, wher it's TikTok or WeChat — re are countless more ... are feeding data directly to Chinese Communist Party, ir national security apparatus,” Pompeo said on FOX News Channel's Sunday Morning Futures.

“Could be ir facial recognition patterns. It could be information about ir residence, ir phone numbers, ir friends, who y're connected to. Those — those are issues that President Trump has me clear we're going to take care of.” Trump h said on Friday that he would soon ban TikTok in United States. A federal committee is reviewing wher that's possible, and its members agree that TikTok cant remain in US in its current form, because it "risks sending back information on 100 million Americans,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

“We all agree re has to be a change...everybody agrees it can't exist as it does," Mnuchin said Sunday on ABC News This Week with George Stephapoulos.

As speculation grew over a ban or sale of social media's US business, TikTok posted a video on Saturday saying: “We're t planning on going anywhere.” TikTok's catchy videos and ease of use has me it popular, and it says it has tens of millions of users in US and hundreds of millions globally.

Its parent company, Bytedance Ltd, launched TikTok in 2017. It bought Musical.ly, a video service popular with teens in US and Europe, and combined two. It has a similar service, Douyin, for users in China.

But TikTok's Chinese ownership has raised concern about potential for sharing user data with Chinese officials as well as censorship of videos critical of Chinese government. TikTok says it does t censor videos and it would t give Chinese government access to US user data.

“ President, when he makes his decision, will make sure that everything we have done drives us as close to zero risk for American people,” Pompeo said. “That's mission set that he laid out for all of us when we get -- we began to evaluate this w several months back. We're closing in on a solution. And I think you will see president's anuncement shortly.” debate over TikTok parallels a broer US security crackdown on Chinese companies, including telecom providers Huawei and ZTE. Trump ministration has ordered that US stop buying equipment from those providers to be used in US networks. Trump has also tried to steer allies away from Huawei over concerns that Chinese government has access to its data, which Huawei denies.