Brendan Carr, a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, has asked Apple and Alphabet’s Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, saying in a letter to the two companies that the popular short-video service poses a “serious” threat to U.S. national security.
TikTok is owned by China-based ByteDance. In the letter, Carr alleges that TikTok “collects vast troves of sensitive data” about U.S. users of the app, and then shares it with China’s government. He pointed to a recent BuzzFeed report saying that leaked...
ByteDance is TikTok's owner.
GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images
Brendan Carr, a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, has asked Apple and Alphabet ’s Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, saying in a letter to the two companies that the popular short-video service poses a “serious” threat to U.S. national security.
TikTok is owned by China-based ByteDance. In the letter, Carr alleges that TikTok “collects vast troves of sensitive data” about U.S. users of the app, and then shares it with China’s government. He pointed to a recent BuzzFeed report saying that leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings showed that China-based employees of ByteDance “have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about U.S. TikTok users.”
In a statement, TikTok said it would “gladly engage” with lawmakers about the “misleading” BuzzFeed report.
“Like many global companies, TikTok has engineering teams around the world. We employ access controls like encryption and security monitoring to secure user data, and the access approval process is overseen by our U.S.-based security team. TikTok has consistently maintained that our engineers in locations outside of the U.S., including China, can be granted access to U.S. user data on an as-needed basis under those strict controls.”
Apple and Google didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The allegations against TikTok are similar to claims made by former President Donald Trump against the company in an executive order in 2020. That order said TikTok “allow[s] the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information—potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.” President Joe Biden later revoked the order.
Carr notes both Apple and Google say their app stores are “safe and trusted places,” but claims that TikTok is neither safe nor trusted.
“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,” Carr said in the letter, which he posted on Twitter . “Therefore I am requesting that you apply the plain text of your app store policies to TikTok and remove it from your app stores for failure to abide by those terms.”
Carr adds that TikTok isn’t just an app for sharing funny videos or memes. “That’s the sheep’s clothing,” he wrote. “At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data.”
The senior Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission, Carr was appointed to his post by Trump. He asked the two companies to respond by July 8.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com