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Washington (AP) - Despite the failure of his attack on Tiktok, President Donald Trump has been targeting further apps from China in the past few days.
Among the eight applications that are to be pushed out of the US market are the payment services Alipay and WeChat Pay.
On Tuesday, Trump issued a decree prohibiting business with the apps - but with the usual 45-day delay.
On January 20, he will no longer be president with the inauguration of his successor Joe Biden.
Then it will be for Biden's government to carry out or revoke the order.
The White House explains the action against the apps with the fear that China could misuse the data obtained about them from American citizens and companies.
Trump also instructed the Commerce Department to find other potentially dangerous apps, a senior government official said on Wednesday night.
Private information from the devices could flow into "global suppression" databases, he warned.
Trump is fighting against “digital totalitarianism”.
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Trump had tried since the summer to force a sale of at least the US business of the popular video app Tiktok to American companies through bans.
But first the Chinese government torpedoed the talks with sales restrictions for the corresponding software.
And then US judges also found that Trump's administration did not have a sufficient legal basis for their actions.
The Tiktok bans are therefore on hold.
Trump's attempt to ban the WeChat messenger app in the USA was also stopped by a US court.
The other apps now affected include the scanning application CamScanner, the chat service Tencent QQ, the video app VMate and the office software WPS Office.
For the list, the apps with the highest risk were selected, said the senior government official, without giving any details about the criteria.
The applications are installed on tens of millions of devices in the United States.
In US courts, the White House could be more successful in cracking down on most of these apps than it was in the TikTok and WeChat cases.
Because there the judges found the obstruction of the free flow of information and a restriction of the freedom of speech problematic.
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© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210106-99-915462 / 2
Trump's decree