Apple, Google urged to remove TikTok from App Stores by Democratic senator
Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat and member of the Intelligence Committee, has asked the chief executive officers of Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google to remove TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform, from their app stores, citing “grave” national security concerns.
“Like most social media platforms, TikTok collects vast and sophisticated data from its users, including faceprints and voiceprints,” Bennet wrote to Apple's Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet. “Unlike most social media platforms, TikTok poses a unique concern because Chinese law obligates ByteDance, its Beijing-based parent, to ‘support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work.'”
He said this “raises the obvious risk that the Chinese Communist Party could weaponize TikTok against the United States” by forcing its parent company to hand over sensitive data from users or manipulate content they see in a way that advances China's interests.
While a number of Republican lawmakers have urged a TikTok ban, Bennet is one of the few Democratic senators to propose such a drastic measure against the app, which is particularly popular among young people.
Brooke Oberwetter, a spokesperson for TikTok, said in a statement that Bennet's letter “relies almost exclusively on misleading reporting about TikTok, the data we collect, and our data security controls.”
“It also ignores the considerable investment we have made through Project Texas — a plan negotiated with our country's top national security experts — to provide additional assurances to our community about their data security and the integrity of the TikTok platform,” she said.
The Biden administration, through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, has been
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