The Republican Commissioner of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), Brendan Carr, sent a request for Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores.
Recently, the BuzzFeed News brought an article with 80 leaked audios of internal meetings of TikTok that prove that employees of the Chinese company repeatedly accessed users’ private information in the United States.
In September 2021, one of the members of TikTok’s “Trust and Safety” department during an all-seeing meeting in China. At another meeting, a director said that an engineer in Beijing called a “Master Administrator” can have access to everything.
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
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) June 28, 2022
hours after the BuzzFeed NewsTikTok announced that it has migrated 100% of its user traffic to the new Oracle Cloud infrastructure, as part of the company’s efforts to minimize accusations from US authorities about how it manages user information in the United States.
In his application, Carr also cites other events he deems “worrying” about TikTok’s practices in handling user data, such as a study where researchers showed that the app can bypass security barriers on Android and iOS to obtain sensitive information.
It is also cited that in 2021, TikTok paid over $92 million to settle various lawsuits over irregular data collection and selling information to advertisers.
Carr has given Apple and Google until July 8 to explain their reasons for not removing the app from their stores if they refuse.
