FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has requested that Apple and Google remove TikTok from their respective app stores in light of recent revelations that its parent firm ByteDance’s Chinese-based workers are accessing user data.
“TikTok is more than a simple video app. That is sheep’s clothes, though. It gathers large amounts of private information that, according to recent sources, is accessible in Beijing “Tweets from Carr.
During the epidemic, the already-popular TikTok witnessed a rise in users, and it currently has over 1 billion MAUs (monthly active users). This is in spite of persistent privacy and national security worries about China-based ByteDance collecting private data on users of the short-form video site.
The recent stories Carr refers to come from BuzzFeed News. The article claims that audio from more than 80 internal ByteDance meetings that were stolen has proven that engineers often accessed private information regarding US TikTok users between September 2021 and January 2022. Several hours after TikTok claimed it had switched all US user traffic to a new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the report was made public.
Carr tweeted a copy of the letter he addressed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook requesting that TikTok be taken off from their respective app stores. Due to its vast data collection and Beijing’s ostensibly unrestricted access to such sensitive material, he claims that the app “poses an intolerable national security danger.”
TikTok is not what it first looks to be, according to Carr’s article. “This app is more than simply a place to share amusing videos or memes. That is sheep’s clothes, though. TikTok is fundamentally a clever monitoring tool that gathers vast quantities of private and sensitive information.”
In a protracted conflict with TikTok, the Trump administration threatened to outlaw the app if a US consumer did not buy it. Despite appearing interested, neither Microsoft nor Oracle took any action. Eventually, the deadline to purchase passed without the government enforcing a restriction.
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