Highlights
- The TikTok app is available to millions of Americans through digital stores.
- FCC commissioner urging Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores, citing security concerns.
- TikTok is a popular short video app that is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
The commissioner of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brendan Carr has requested the Tech-giants Apple and Google to remove the Chinese short video-making app TikTok from their respective digital stores over data security concerns.
TikTok is owned by a Chinese company ByteDance, it hosts a variety of short videos with a duration from 15 seconds to 10 minutes for different genres like dance, jokes, stunts, pranks, tricks, and entertainment.
The commissioner of the FCC in writing asked the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai to kick out TikTok from their app stores because of TikTok’s pattern of surreptitious data practices.
In his letter, Carr clearly stated that TikTok harvests vast troves of sensitive data about American users that could be accessed by ByteDance staff in Beijing.
TikTok is not what appears to be on the surface. It is not just another video app for sharing memes or funny videos. That’s the sheep’s clothing. He added that at its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests swaths of personal and sensitive data.
In his letter to the CEOs of Apple and Google Brendan showed his concerns, as you know TikTok is available to millions of American users through app stores, and it collects an extensive amount of personal and sensitive data of those users, which is a national risk for us.
It is clear that TikTok causes an unacceptable national security risk, due to its extensive data harvesting and Beijing’s apparently unrestricted access to that personal and sensitive data.
Carr’s letter, dated June 24 on FCC’s letterhead, asked Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores, and in case they don’t wish to comply with the same they have to provide their responses to him, explaining the reason behind their action by July 8.
In 2020, India also banned TikTok along with some other Chinese apps over national security concerns. Former president of the US Donald Trump and the current president Joe Biden both have raised the question about the relationship between China and this short video app for the matter of security and personal data leaks. Trump nominated Carr in 2018 for a five-year term with FCC.
The letter cited BuzzFeed News Report that the China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed data about American TikTok users.
The report brought up some leaked audios from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings, which clearly stated that from September 2021 to December 2022, engineers in China had access to US data.
Apple and Google are yet to respond to this request, as there is no information about the reaction till now.
Reaction on controversy
A TikTok spokesperson said that like many other Global companies TikTok also has an engineering team around the world. We employ access controls like security controlling and encryption to secure user data, and our US-based security team is overseen the access approval process. Also added is that the company’s engineers in locations outside of the US, including China, can be granted access to American user data, on an as-needed basis, under strict controls.
TikTok is a short video app that is being liked a lot by people in today’s era. But at the same time, questions regarding its user data practices have been raised many times.
To address these concerns, TikTok said that it has migrated US users’ data to servers at Oracle Corp. within the country and that 100% of US user traffic is now hosted by the Oracle cloud provider.