In an effort to discover why President Trump is so ticked off with TikTok and why Microsoft would want to buy the user-generated video app, I finally relented and downloaded it to my phone at the weekend.
Alarmed that US secretary of state Mike Pompeo had said this was the same as me passing my private information directly to the Chinese Communist party, I was reassured to find I could still watch stupid dance videos without even registering an account. When I did go to the Sign Up page, it turned out I could just use my existing Facebook, Apple, Google or Twitter account to log in, rather than give TikTok any personal details (Note to Redmond supremo Satya Nadella: there is no Microsoft account login option, so you might want to fix that).
Anyway, this pottering around with a pointless Chinese-owned app led me to the conclusion that President Trump is perhaps just mad at China in general, although his advisers may have brought up trade issues and someone just might have mentioned how advances in AI are built on mining and learning from large data sets and facial recognition technology improvements thrive on access to video databases.