A commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) urged Google and Apple to drop TikTok from their app stores due to data security concerns on the famous Chinese-owned video app.
Republican Brendan Carr wrote to Apple and Google on Tuesday, stating that TikTok has a "pattern of conduct and misrepresentations regarding the unfettered access that persons in Beijing have to sensitive U.S. user data" that breached their rules and therefore should be removed from the app store, as per a report from The New York Times.
Because the FCC does not regulate app stores and its Democratic chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel generally sets the commission's agenda, commissioner Carr's request is unlikely to be granted. However, it underscores the constant pressure Washington authorities have put on Chinese tech firms.
US Government Closely Monitoring TikTok
Both former President Trump and President Biden have expressed concerns about TikTok due to privacy and national security issues.
After potential agreements with Microsoft and Oracle fell through, the Trump administration gave TikTok deadlines to find a US buyer or face a ban in the country. However, the deadlines passed without any US government action.
Early this year, the Biden Administration established new regulations that would give the US government additional power over applications like TikTok that would present a threat to national security.
TikTok has insisted that it is taking precautions to prevent its Chinese employees from accessing its data. It claimed that it was sending all data from its American users through servers managed by the American cloud computing company Oracle before a recent news story from BuzzFeed News exposed that it was having difficulty doing so.
Personnel in China Have Access to US TikTok Users' Data
Chinese company ByteDance owns the widely used video app. Business Insider reported that the company engineers in China could access US user data around September 2021 and January 2022 based on leaked recordings from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings.
For years, TikTok has responded to data privacy concerns by swearing that information from US users is stored in the country, rather than China, where ByteDance is based.
But the recordings indicate that ByteDance personnel in China have accessed the private data of US TikTok users multiple times.
The recordings, which cover a wide range from small-group discussions with business executives and consultants to policy all-hands presentations, are supported by screenshots and other documents. This substantial body of evidence supports earlier claims that staff members based in China had access to US user data.
Even though a TikTok executive testified under oath in a Senate hearing in October 2021 that a "world-renowned US-based security team" selects who has access to this data, nine statements from eight different employees detail instances in which US employees had to consult their Chinese counterparts to understand how US user data was being transferred.
According to the recordings, US workers did not have authorization or understanding of how to access the material.
The recordings eventually imply that the tech firm may have deceived Congress, its users, and the general public by downplaying the possibility that employees in China might still access data stored in the US.
