TikTok is more than just a video app. The sheep's clothing is shown. Brendan Carr sent a letter to Apple and Google asking them to take TikTok out of their app stores. The senior Republican commissioner references a recent report that looked at leaked audio from internal TikTok meetings. Employees of ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, accessed private information on users in the US based on leaked audio recordings. A member of TikTok's Trust and Safety department said during a meeting that "everything is seen in China," according to a report. The engineer referred to as "Master Admin" has access to everything, according to a director. A few hours before the report was published, TikTok announced that it had migrated 100 percent of US user traffic to a new cloud infrastructure. The company is trying to address concerns by US authorities about how it handles information from users in the country. 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. I’ve called on @Apple & @Google to remove TikTok from their app stores for its pattern of surreptitious data practices. pic.twitter.com/Le01fBpNjn
M. Moon|06.29.22
Carr listed other reports showing "concerning evidence and determinations regarding TikTok's data practices" that included previous instances where researchers discovered that the app can circumvent safeguards to access users' sensitive data. He pointed to TikTok's decision to pay $92 million to settle dozens of lawsuit, mostly from children, accusing it of collecting their personal data without consent and selling it to advertisers.
Carr was writing.
"It is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due its extensive data harvesting being combined with Beijing's apparently unchecked access to that sensitive data."
If they don't remove the app from their stores by July 8th, he will give them a month to do so. It doesn't appear that the other FCC Commissioners are involved in the letter. We reached out to all of the parties to get their official statement.
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