FCC Commissioner urges Apple, Alphabet to drop TikTok from app stores

NEW YORK A Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission has urged the chief executives of Apple and Alphabet Inc. to kick Chinese-owned TikTok out of its app stores.

Brendan Carr, the FCC Commissioner, said in a letter to the CEOs and sent on FCC letterhead that TikTok collected troves of sensitive data about U.S. users that could be accessed by ByteDance staff in Beijing. Carr tweeted details of the letter on Tuesday.

TikTok is not just a video app. Carr said on Twitter that sheep's clothing is the sheep's clothing. Carr asked the companies to remove TikTok from their app stores by July 8 or explain why they did not plan to do so.

Carr's request is unusual given that the FCC doesn't have clear jurisdiction over the content of app stores. The FCC can grant certain communications licenses to companies through its authority to regulate the national security space.

A spokeswoman for TikTok said that the company's engineers in locations outside the United States, including China, can be granted access to U.S. user data on an as-needed basis and under strict controls. Google declined to comment on Carr's letter, while Apple didn't respond immediately to a request for comment.

TikTok was subject to U.S. regulatory scrutiny over its collection of U.S. personal data. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States CFIUS, which reviews deals by foreign acquirers for potential national security risks, ordered ByteDance in 2020 to divest TikTok because of fears that U.S. user data could be passed on to China's communist government.

To address these concerns, TikTok said earlier this month that it moved the information of its U.S. users to servers at Oracle.

A spokesman for the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which chairs CFIUS, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Richard Sofield, a national security partner at law firm Vinson Elkins LLP, said that TikTok's partnership with Oracle is a suggestion that at least some parts of the U.S. government don't think this is enough.