A Federal Communications Commission member has urged the CEOs of Apple and Alphabet’s Google to remove Chinese-owned TikTok from its app stores.
Brendan Carr, the Republican FCC commissioner, said in a letter that video-sharing app TikTok has collected a massive amount of sensitive data about users in the U.S. that may be accessed by the staff of ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based parent, in Beijing.
“TikTok is not just another video app. That’s the sheep’s clothing.It harvests swaths of sensitive data that new reports show are being accessed in Beijing,” Carr said on Twitter.
Carr urged the tech giants to either remove TikTok from their app stores by July 8 or explain why they choose not to do so.
A spokesperson from TikTok said the company’s engineers located offshore, including China, can obtain access to U.S. user data “as-needed” and under “strict controls.”
TikTok , long under U.S. regulatory scrutiny over its collection of U.S. personal data, said earlier this month that it moved the information of its U.S. users to servers maintained by Oracle Corp .
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), tasked to review deals by foreign acquirers for possible national security risks, mandated ByteDance in 2020 to divest TikTok due to fears that U.S. user data could be accessed by China’s communist government.
For more information, read the original story in Reuters.