U.S. FC Commissioner, Brendan Carr has written to Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores for harvesting data from U.S. citizens. In his open letter, he called the video-sharing app owned by Chinese company ByteDance a national security risk for providing “unchecked” access to users’ sensitive data to the Chinese government.
This is not the first time that TikTok has been in hot waters in the United States. Former President Donald Trump launched an extensive effort to ban TikTok from the country over national security concerns, same as the FCC Commissioner.
Although the social media company clarified that it did not share with or send U.S. users to Beijing, he issued an executive order for TikTok to sell its U.S. operations to an American company or face its removal from the App Store and Google Play in the county.
However, the threat of a ban on the app ended with the end of Trump’s presidency. President Joe Biden’s administration did not appeal against the court ruling to stop the app’s ban.
Republican FCC Commissioner goes after TikTok over BuzzFeed report claiming “everything is seen in China”
FCC Commissioner Carr shared his letter written to Apple and Google on Twitter and wrote that TikTok is more than a video-sharing app, it’s the “sheep’s clothing” of a wolf that “harvests swaths of sensitive data” which is accessed in Beijing, China.
He has based his allegations on a new report by BuzzFeed which cites nine employees who claimed that Chinese engineers had access to the non-public U.S. user data like searches, browsing history, and biometric identifiers at least from September 2021 to January 2022. He wrote:
“It is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due to its extensive data harvesting being combined with Beijing’s apparently unchecked access to that sensitive data. Therefore, I am requesting that you apply the plain text of your app store policies to TikTok and remove it from your app stores for failure to abide by those terms.”
The video-sharing company had announced that it transferred U.S. users’ data to servers run by Oracle.
Read More:
