The war between the two giants, China and the United States, is going on.
In September the US Department of Justice asked a federal judge for permission to forbid Apple and Google from downloading the Chinese application WeChat in their app stores.
What is it about? WeChat that belongs to the Chinese group Tencet is precisely an all-in-one messaging application for all smartphones that combines services like Facebook, Instagram, VenMo and WhatsApp. In the United States there are about 19 million active users every day, mostly Chinese students and Americans living in China.
The reasons why the United States would like to ban this application are related to the “integrity” of the nation. The government consider it as a threat to foreign policy and national security of the United States. According to the Department of Justice WeChat collects and transmits Americans’ sensitive personal information, these data are accessible to Tencot and stored in data centres in China and Canada.
Tencet group presented the so-called “mitigation proposal”, a proposal to create a new American version of the application, to manage it by an entity based in the United States, to implement security measures in order to protect the source code of the applications and also to store users’ data with a US cloud provider.
In addition to WeChat the Chinese social network TikTok and the company Huawei are also facing problems with the United States government. Even the Chinese company Huawei has been accused of being a threat to American security.
A few days ago, the Appeals Court rejected the Justice Department application to ban WeChat downloads.
Judge Laurel Beeler suspended the block on downloads because “the government’s interest in national security is certainly significant. But on the record – while the government ruled that China’s activities raise significant national security concerns – it provided little evidence that the effective WeChat ban for all US users solves those concerns”.
At this time both the Chinese app and Tencet can breathe a sigh of relief.
