FCC commissioner calls on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores

A member of the Federal Communications Commission is renewing calls for Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, citing national security concerns surrounding TikTok's Chinese-based parent company, ByteDance.

Brendan Carr's appeal to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai followed a Buzzfeed News report last week that - based on over a dozen leaked recordings from internal TikTok meetings - showed the Chinese firm had "repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about U.S. TikTok users."

In a statement, TikTok called the report "misleading".

"Like many global companies, TikTok has engineering teams around the world," TikTok said. "We employ access controls like encryption and security monitoring to secure user data, and the access approval process is overseen by our US-based security team. TikTok has consistently maintained that our engineers in locations outside of the US, including China, can be granted access to U.S. user data on an as-needed basis under those strict controls."

TikTok's user data practices have come under suspicion many times. In 2020, India banned TikTok over national security concerns, and both former President Donald Trump and the current president Joe Biden have raised questions about the short video app's relations with China and how it affects U.S. users' data. While Trump proposed an outright ban on TikTok or an option of selling its U.S. business to a local buyer, Biden proposed new rules that will give more oversight on apps with ties to "jurisdiction of foreign adversaries" that may pose national security risks.

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