FCC Commissioner Urges Apple, Google to Pull TikTok From App Stores
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr is urging Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores.
The agency's senior Republican last week sent a letter to company CEOs Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai asking that they ban TikTok "for failure to abide by" store policies.
Citing a report that officials at TikTok parent company ByteDance in Beijing repeatedly accessed sensitive data collected from US users, Carr claims the popular platform "is not just an app for sharing funny videos or memes."
"That's the sheep's clothing," he wrote. "At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data," including search and browsing histories, keystroke patterns, and biometric identifiers.
Carr goes on to list more than a dozen pieces of "evidence or determinations regarding TikTok's data practices," like a loophole in the Android OS that allowed the social network to stockpile millions of MAC addresses, or the time the US Navy banned TikTok due to the video-sharing app's emergence as a "cybersecurity threat."
"It is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due to its extensive data harvesting being combined with Beijing's apparently unchecked access to that sensitive data," according to Carr. "But it is also clear that TikTok's pattern of conduct and misrepresentations regarding the unfettered access that persons in Beijing have to sensitive US user data […] puts it out of compliance with the policies that both of your companies require every app to adhere to as a condition of remaining available on your app stores."
On the same day details of the leaked TikTok audio were shared publicly, TikTok announced plans to re-route all US user traffic
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