I'm ambivalent. On the one hand, the executive shouldn't have the ability to just randomly start "banning" apps without going through some sort of formal, public process to prove that these apps are facilitating criminal activity by the Chinese Communist Party.

On the other hand, earlier this year my partner and I were on the receiving end of this criminal activity. A friend of mine who happened to have a politically-connected family in China and who suffered from borderline personality disorder became obsessed with me to an unhealthy extent. Using his family connection, he was able to download a huge report on my partner from the Chinese government's mass surveillance database. This report included every place we had ever been to when traveling in China (likely sourced from a Chinese map app), communications over WeChat between my partner and others, a list of every purchase we had made recently (likely sourced from Chinese payment services), personal details like knowing exactly which visa my partner was applying for (unclear how this information was obtained), and most shockingly, a list of every person my partner had ever had sex with (as if to somehow "prove" that my partner wasn't worthy of me) which data seems to have been sourced from Grindr or Tinder.

Worst of all, my partner had produced some works that weren't overtly critical of the Chinese government but were on a subject that it could perhaps view as critical, and my friend-turned-stalker's government report noted this. The stalker said that if I don't promise to dump my partner, he will have my partner detained for three months in China on the basis of producing these critical works. The day at the airport was terrifying but ultimately we got out.

I reported the stalker to the police and the FBI, and everything seems to be fine now, although my stalker's threat to punish me — for not dating him — by messing with my partner's family in China still stands. And of course I have to keep this all vague and anonymous since he threatened to do much worse if I share anything with the world about him or his political family.

But this incident illustrates some pretty amazing things: the Chinese government is vacuuming up as much data as it can, though obviously it has much more access to its own citizens' data than ours; random Chinese nationals living in the United States who are lucky to have political connections in China have the ability to ruin the lives of US citizens using this vast database, which despite incredible sophistication apparently has few access safeguards; American dating apps like Grindr or Tinder, and possibly many more apps, have already been compromised and the Chinese government is building a network of Americans' personal relationships.

Just think about the damage this stalker could have done if he were an intelligence officer and I had access to confidential information.

Another interesting tidbit I left out from above is the technology side of this. My partner is not well-known at all, certainly not enough to warrant an actual person hunting down all this information, so apparently the Chinese government has some AI that goes around the Internet collecting all this information and making intelligent inferences about it — particularly regarding the works my partner had produced. This is unsurprising. More surprising: while I can't verify anything he said, the stalker told me that he needed to secure his iPhone in order to receive the government report, and that all it took was to give the secretary in China his phone number, after which his phone promptly restarted itself without any input from him. He claimed that this made his phone secure from US government surveillance. I didn't take this seriously as it sounded like BS. A most disturbing thing happened, however: unprompted by me, my Android phone (a top of the line model, not just some random low-end phone) randomly rebooted itself in the middle of a phone call with him. That shouldn't happen.