FCC member Brandan Carr calls on Google and Apple to remove TikTok from app stores

FCC member Brandan Carr calls on Google and Apple to remove TikTok from app stores

Washington, 7/1/2022

A member of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has called on Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores due to data security concerns related to China.

In an open letter shared on Twitter, Brendan Carr argues that TikTok poses a risk to national security because it allegedly collects data and China has access to that data.

Carr, an attorney and the ranking Republican on the FCC, sent the letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

Carr writes that TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is a „sophisticated surveillance tool that collects large amounts of personal and sensitive data.“ He argues that this data access means that the TikTok app does not comply with Apple and Google Store policies.

On June 17, BuzzFeed News reported that China-based ByteDance engineers had access to U.S. user data from September 2021 to January 2022, citing leaked audio recordings of 80 internal TikTok meetings.

Around the same time, TikTok announced that it was redirecting all of its user traffic in the U.S. to Oracle servers instead of storing it in its own data centers in the U.S. and Singapore, although those servers would continue to be used for backup.

TikTok plans to delete all private data of US users from its own centers and redirect it to Oracle cloud servers in the US.