Popular video sharing app TikTok is a wolf in “sheep’s clothing”
that should be removed from the Apple and Google app stores, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said in an open letter on Tuesday.
Carr, the Federal Communications Commission’s senior Republican member, called for the ban in a letter dated June 24 and addressed to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Carr’s letter made heavy reference to a recent report detailing leaked audio from internal meetings among American TikTok employees revealing that China-based employees of parent company ByteDance had regular and sweeping access to nonpublic US user data.
Carr likened TikTok’s video- and meme-sharing features to “sheep’s clothing” meant to distract from questionable privacy practices.
“At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data,” Carr wrote. “Indeed, TikTok collects everything from search and browsing histories to keystroke patterns and biometric identifiers, including faceprints…and voiceprints.”
“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 wrote in the letter, which was posted to his Twitter account.
“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 added.
- Info courtesy of the New York Post
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