FCC Commissioner asks Apple, Google to remove TikTok from app stores

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has asked Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, saying in a letter to the two companies that the popular short-video service poses a serious threat to U.S. national security.

TikTok is owned by China-based ByteDance. In the letter, Carr alleges that TikTok collects large amounts of sensitive data about US users of the app, and then shares it with China's government. He pointed out in a recent BuzzFeed report that China-based ByteDance employees have accessed nonpublic data about U.S. TikTok users, as shown by leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings. Apple, Google and TikTok didn't respond immediately to requests for comment. In an executive order in 2020, the allegations are similar to those made by former President Donald Trump against TikTok. The order said that TikTok would allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans personal and proprietary information - potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage. President Joe Biden later revoked the order. Carr notes that both Apple and Google say their app stores are safe and trusted places, but they also claim that TikTok is neither safe nor trusted. Carr said in a letter posted on Twitter that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due to its extensive data harvesting and Beijing's apparently unchecked access to sensitive data. 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. He wrote that sheep's clothing was the sheep's clothing. TikTok is a sophisticated surveillance tool that collects large amounts of personal and sensitive data. Carr was appointed by Trump to his position as a senior Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission. He asked the two companies to respond by July 8.