A key official at the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said it has asked Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores due to concerns about the security of user.
TikTok is one of the most popular apps to see a significant surge during the pandemic. The video app is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, which faced U.S. scrutiny when Donald Trump was still president.
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Brendan Carr, one of the FCC commissioners, shared a letter on Twitter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. The letter contained references and other evidence that TikTok does not comply with the two companies' app store policies.
“It is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security due to its extensive data collection combined with Beijing’s apparently unchecked access to this sensitive data,” Carr wrote. “I therefore ask that you enforce the plain text of your app store policies on TikTok and remove it from your app stores for noncompliance with these terms.”
“TikTok is not what it seems on the surface. It is not just an app for sharing funny videos or memes,” the letter states. “At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that collects extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data.”
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The letter appears to have been sent on June 24 and stated that if Apple and Alphabet do not remove TikTok from their app stores, they will have to provide explanations by July 8.
Citing a recent reportthat said Chinese TikTok employees had access to American user data, Carr highlighted the national security risks. According to the report, employee showed that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022.
Taking these and other similar reports into account, Mr. Carr said that if Apple and Google do not remove TikTok, they should explain in detail “the basis for your company’s conclusion that covert access to private and sensitive US user data by individuals located in Beijing, combined with TikTok’s pattern of misleading representations and conduct, does not violate any of your app store policies.”
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On June 17, the same day the report was published, TikTok announced that it was routing all US to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and that it was moving US users' personal data from its own data centers (US and Singapore) to Oracle cloud servers in the US.
Source: www.cnbc.com
