US FCC Commissioner Urged Google, Apple to Ban TikTok From App Stores

Brenden Carr, Commissioner of FCC (Federal Communication Commission) is urging Google and Apple to remove TikTok app from their respective app stores. Last week, he sent a letter to the CEOs of both companies asking that they should ban TikTok for failing to abide by app store policies.

According to a report, the officials at ByteDance, parent company of TikTok in China are repeatedly accessing sensitive data collected from users in the United States, and Brenden Carr is claiming TikTok is not just an app for sharing memes and funny videos.

Brenden Carr said that is sheep’s clothing, at its core, TikTok mainly functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that is used to harvest extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data including browsing histories and search, biometric identifiers and keystroke patterns.

Brenden Carr has a list of over a dozen pieces of determinations and evidence regarding the data practices of TikTok such as a loophole in the Android OS that has allowed the company to collect millions of MAC addresses.

He added, it is clear that TikTok is possessing an unacceptable risk to national security because of the company’s extensive data harvesting being combined with apparently unchecked access of China to the collected sensitive data.