Washington and New York: A Republican FCC commissioner has urged Apple Inc. and Google, a division of Alphabet Inc., to ban Chinese-owned TikTok from their respective app stores.
In a letter to the CEOs dated June 24 and sent on FCC letterhead, Brendan Carr, the FCC commissioner, claimed that TikTok, a video-sharing app, had amassed enormous amounts of private information about American users that ByteDance employees in Beijing could access. TikTok’s Chinese parent is ByteDance.
TikTok is more than a simple video app. That’s the shepard’s fur,” Carr wrote on Twitter. It gathers large amounts of private information that, according to recent reports, is accessed in Beijing.
Carr demanded that the businesses either take TikTok off of their app stores by July 8 or provide an explanation for their decision not to do so.
Given that the FCC lacks a clear legal authority over the content of app stores, Carr’s request is unusual. The FCC has the power to grant companies with specific communications licenses, which it typically does in order to regulate the national security sector.
According to a TikTok spokesperson, the company’s engineers based abroad, including in China, may be given access to U.S. user data “as needed” and under “strict controls.”
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Google declined to address Carr’s letter.
