A leader of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said he has asked Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores due to data security concerns.
Citing China-related data security concerns, Brendan Carr, one of the commissioners of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wrote a letter to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook and Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai about these concerns.
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The wildly popular short video app is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, and in his letter, which he publicly shared on his Twitter account, the US FCC commissioner cited several reports of security issues.
The letter pointed to reports and other developments that made TikTok non-compliant with the two companies’ app store policies that proved that the Chinese-owned video app did not comply with the policies required by Apple Store and Google Play Stores.
“TikTok is not what it appears to be on the surface. It is not just an app for sharing funny videos or meme. That’s the sheep’s clothing,” he said in the letter. “At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data.”
