FCC Commissioner Calls for Apple and Google to Ban TikTok Over 'Surreptitious' Data Practices

The FCC wants Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores because of its data practices.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr is said to have written to Apple and Google to make a request after a report claimed that staff in China had access to U.S. users' data.

"As you know TikTok is an app that is available to millions of Americans through your app stores, and it collects vast troves of sensitive data about those US users. TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance — an organization that is beholden to the Communist Party of China and required by the Chinese law to comply with PRC's surveillance demands," Carr said in a letter addressed to Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook.

"It is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due to its extensive data harvesting being combined with Beijing's apparently unchecked access to that sensitive data."

TikTok has historically responded to data privacy concerns by promising that the data of users in the United States is stored in the U.S., rather than China. The Chinese staff of TikTok had access to U.S. user data up until January 2022. In an October 2021 Senate hearing, a TikTok executive testified that a US-based security team decides who gets access to U.S. users' data.

TikTok responded to the report by saying that it is moving all users' data to the country. Users' private data will be deleted from the company's own data centers in the US and Singapore in the future.

"We're making operational changes in line with this work, including the new department we recently established, with US-based leadership, to only manage US user data for TikTok," the company said.

TikTok's user data practices have been a point of controversy for a long time. Trump wanted to ban the short-form video app TikTok.

Despite claims by the Trump administration that the apps posed a risk to national security, Trump's bans were never implemented.

In June 2021, President Joe Biden revoked the executive orders that Trump issued in August, which tried to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S. company. The Biden administration said it is taking an evidence-based approach when reviewing security concerns.

Biden's executive order states that the collecting of data from Americans threatens to provide foreign adversaries with access to that information, and directs the Commerce Department to continually evaluate any transactions that pose an undue risk of catastrophic effects on the security or resilience of the critical infrastructure.

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