Trump said last week he was thinking of stopping the popular TikTok app.

In an interview for Fox News, Navarro argued that “what the American people should understand is that all the data entering those apps goes to servers in China, respectively, to the Chinese Communist Party”.

He said these apps could be used to steal intellectual property.

So expect powerful action from Trump”, Navarro warned.

The application for quick video distribution, TikTok belongs to the Chinese group ByteDance and has nearly one billion users worldwide.

TikTok has sought to distance himself from its Chinese owners, stressing that there is an American Executive Director and consistently denies claims that he shares data with Beijing.

WeChat, owned by Tencent, is the main message app in China with more than a billion users.

On Friday, the Amazon company said it wrongly sent workers an email telling them to remove the TikTok app from their mobile phones, due to security concerns.

A Amazon spokesman later told AFP that “has no change in our policies now regarding TikTok”.

The Democrats' campaign teams for US presidential elections have been urged to avoid using TikTok in personal equipment and, if used, not install it on a working phone.

Marketer's research company estimates that TikTok has more than 52 million American users, reports AFP.