A frontrunner of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission mentioned he has requested Apple and Google to take away TikTok from their app shops over information safety considerations. Pictured right here is the TikTok obtain web page on an Apple iPhone on August 7, 2020.
Drew Angerer | Getty Images News | Getty Images
BEIJING — A frontrunner of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission mentioned he has requested Apple and Google to take away TikTok from their app shops over China-related information safety considerations.
The wildly standard brief video app is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, which confronted U.S. scrutiny underneath President Donald Trump.
Brendan Carr, one of many FCC’s commissioners, shared by way of Twitter a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. The letter pointed to experiences and different developments that made TikTok non-compliant with the 2 firms’ app retailer insurance policies.
“TikTok is not what it appears to be on the surface. It is not just an app for sharing funny videos or meme. That’s the sheep’s clothing,” he mentioned within the letter. “At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data.”
Alphabet, Apple and TikTok didn’t instantly reply to CNBC requests for remark.
Carr’s letter, dated June 24 on FCC letterhead, mentioned if the Apple and Alphabet don’t take away TikTok from their app shops, they need to present statements to him by July 8.
The statements ought to clarify “the basis for your company’s conclusion that the surreptitious access of private and sensitive U.S. user data by persons located in Beijing, coupled with TikTok’s pattern of misleading representations and conduct, does not run afoul of any of your app store policies,” he mentioned.
Trump nominated Carr in 2018 to a five-year time period with the FCC. The Senate confirmed in December that the fee’s chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, would keep on for an additional five-year time period.
Carr’s letter cited a BuzzFeed News report from earlier within the month that mentioned recordings of TikTok worker statements indicated engineers in China had entry to U.S. information between September 2021 and January 2022.
The BuzzFeed report included an announcement from a TikTok spokesperson.
It mentioned: “We know we’re among the most scrutinized platforms from a security standpoint, and we aim to remove any doubt about the security of US user data. That’s why we hire experts in their fields, continually work to validate our security standards, and bring in reputable, independent third parties to test our defenses.”
On June 17, the identical day because the BuzzFeed report, TikTok introduced it was routing all of U.S. consumer visitors to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and was shifting U.S. customers’ personal information from its personal information facilities within the U.S. and Singapore to Oracle cloud servers within the U.S.
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