The United States can pass a law that prevents app stores, such as Apple's App Store, or Google Play for Android by Google, to integrate applications that accept payments made in Chinese digital currency.
A legislative proposal was presented this Thursday and is authored by a group of republican senators, which justifies it with security fears, regarding personal data that may be exposed in transactions with the digital yuan.
According to Reuters, which disclosed the legislative initiative firsthand, the proposal defends that the companies that own or control app stores “must not advertise or host any app in their app stores in the United States that supports or allows transactions with e-CNY”.
In further clarifications to the agency, the Tom Cotton, one of the three Republican senators who sign the proposal, indicates that the Chinese digital currency can giving the government of that country “real-time visibility into all transactions on the network, which raises privacy and security concerns for Americans who join this network”.
The measure may not be unrelated to some recent decisions made by applications with a large user base, such as the WeChat, which last month announced its intention to start accepting payments as digital yuan. WeChat is owned by Chinese giant Tencent. Other services, such as Alipay, have already started accepting the coin.
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It should be noted that the concerns now mirrored by the republican proposal were also underlined by a report released at the beginning of last year, authored by the Center for a New American Security.
The think-thank considered that the Chinese digital currency was poised to be “an asset to the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance operations in the economy and government interference in the lives of Chinese citizens”🇧🇷 The group added that transactions carried out in this way have “precise data on users and their financial activity”.
The United States has blocked the action of several Chinese companies in its territory due to security concerns. of the data exposed to the technologies that these companies make available. The focus has, however, been more on technologies that come into contact with critical systems for the country, such as telecommunications networks, or that may have access to State information. This new proposal extends security concerns to the personal data of its citizens.
China is one of the most advanced countries in testing and adopting an official digital currency, even as an alternative to any cryptocurrency with decentralized management. The digital Yuan is controlled by the country's central bank. Its adoption has been tested in phases and gradually in different pilot areas of the country, before moving towards more massive adoption.
At the beginning of the year, the central bank revealed that 261 million people, equivalent to one-fifth of China's population, already had a digital yuan wallet🇧🇷 The number was reached just a month after the app was launched in local app stores and with the option only available to test zone residents.
