Just ten days after TikTok wrote in a blog post about how the platform tries to protect users' personal data in the US, FCC member Brendan Carr wrote an email to Tim Cook - CEO of Apple and Sundar Pichai - CEO of Google asking the two companies to ban short videos from being shared on the TikTok platform from their corresponding app stores.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese-based and US-based company, which is concerned that ByteDance will provide US user data to the Chinese government at any time as required by the government.
According to Carr, new reports show that sensitive data is being accessed in Beijing. He even called TikTok the wereback of a flock.
In addition, according to a recently published report from BuzzFeed News, a senior Republican Party member who declared that leaked audio from 80 internal TikTok meetings pointed out that employees of ByteDance (Tictics' parent company) based in China had accessed the personal information of Americans.
In September 2021, a member of TikTok's "Trust and Safety" department said that "everything is seen in China".
Strangely, hours after this BuzzFeed News report was published, TikTok announced that all US user traffic has now been switched to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and is only available in the US.
However, it seems that Carr is certainly not fascinated by the efforts of the China-based social media platform to address data concerns.
In his letter, he also listed other reports that showed body of evidence related to TikToks data-related decisions.
Among them, there are reports where researchers have found that TikTok may overcome Android and iOS protections to access users' sensitive data.
He stressed in a letter to Cook and Pichai that TikTok was an un acceptable national security risk, and that the widespread data collection with Beijings participation in checking sensitive data was a matter of concern to the Commissioner.
He listed the data that Tiktok is allegedly collecting: web search and browsing history, typing style, biometric identification number, videos and metadata, text, images and videos stored on the device's temporary storage device.
In his letter, he gave the two tech giants until July 8, 2022 to explain why TikTok is still in their store (in case they don't remove it).
