A FCC commissioner compared the well-known social media site to a wolf in sheep’s clothing and demanded that TikTok be removed from Apple and Google’s app stores.
The top Republican FCC commissioner, Brendan Carr, wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook on Tuesday. He encouraged the businesses to remove TikTok from their individual app stores because it “harvests swaths of sensitive data” from U.S. consumers in the open letter.
Carr’s letter frequently alludes to a recent BuzzFeed article that claimed TikTok employees in China had unrestricted access to the data of American users. According to the information acquired from nine different TikTok employees, Chinese programmers had access to private user information for Americans.
Tuesday, Carr said in a tweet that the app’s video features were just a “sheep’s clothing.” The commissioner claimed that TikTok collects “everything from search and browser histories to keystroke patterns and biometric identifiers, including faceprints and voiceprints,” apparently quoting the June report.
Due to its enormous data collection and Beijing’s ostensibly unrestricted access to that sensitive material, Carr concluded that TikTok poses an intolerable national security risk. Because TikTok has violated these terms, I’m asking that you apply the plain text of your app store policies to it and remove it from your app shops.
According to a BuzzFeed investigation, a TikTok employee claimed in leaked audio from a meeting in September 2021 that an unnamed ByteDance engineer in China had “access to everything.” TikTok’s main business, ByteDance, is situated in China.
A few hours prior to the report’s publication, TikTok declared that it has moved its American user data on local Oracle servers.
According to reports, Chinese staff members had access to user data belonging to Americans from at least September 2021 to January 2022.
TikTok has previously gotten into trouble in the United States. Then-President Donald Trump issued an executive order in 2020 requiring ByteDance to withdraw from TikTok or face being banned in the United States. The White House gave this reason at the time: national security.
However, under President Joe Biden, efforts to compel the sale of TikTok to American businesses seem to have failed.
