FCC commissioner calls for Apple, Google to ditch TikTok from their app stores: A wolf in 'sheep's clothing'

[Ubiquitous]

After yet another user data breach in China, the social media app TikTok is
once again in the crosshairs of U.S. officials, this time from the FCC.

Earlier this month, BuzzFeed reported that ByteDance, the Chinese company
that owns TikTok, had access to private data information about American
TikTok users. Now, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has reached out to
executives at Apple and Google to request that the two tech giants remove the
TikTok app from their app stores.

In a letter addressed to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai,
Carr warns about the national security threat posed by the social media app
that is popular with Americans, especially teens and 20-somethings.

"TikTok is not what it appears to be on the surface," Carr wrote. "It's not
just an app for sharing funny videos or memes. That's the sheep's clothing.
At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that
harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data."

According to the BuzzFeed report, audio recordings at ByteDance collected
between September 2021 and January 2022 revealed that nine employees located
in China had openly discussed accessing sensitive American user data,
including phone numbers and birthdates.

On one recording from last September, a ByteDance employee in TikTok’s Trust
and Safety department says, "Everything is seen in China."

In his letter, Carr claims that ByteDance "is beholden to the Communist Party
of China and required by Chinese law to comply with the PRC's surveillance
demands."

And Carr is just the latest to sound the alarm regarding TikTok. Politicians
from across the political spectrum — including President Biden, former
President Trump, Sens. Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton, and others — have
expressed misgivings about TikTok.

"The concerns over TikTok are shared on a bipartisan basis," Carr notes.

TikTok has recently attempted to quell some of those concerns. On the same
day that the BuzzFeed report dropped, TikTok announced publicly that "100% of
US user traffic is being routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure."

Routing U.S. user traffic through Oracle, an American company headquartered
in Austin, does not fix the problem, though, according to Carr, since the
data can still be accessed outside the United States, including in Beijing.

Because of the severity of the security issues that TikTok has repeatedly
demonstrated, and Apple's and Google's obligation to honor their own security
standards and protocols, Carr closes the letter by asking Apple and Google to
remove the app entirely from their stores.

Otherwise, he demands that they explain in writing how "the surreptitious
access of private and sensitive U.S. user data by persons located in Beijing,
coupled with TikTok's pattern of misleading representation and conduct, does
not run afoul of any of your app store policies."

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Let's go Brandon!