The US Federal Communications Commission is demanding that Apple and Google remove TikTok from app stores

TikTok already had problems with the US government. Then Donald Trump tried to separate the social network from its parent company ByteDance, emphasizing the problems with the data security of American users. With the change of the President of the United States, this situation subsided, but it did not save TikTok from new problems.

Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Brendan Carr has written an open letter to Apple and Google executives urging them to remove TikTok from app stores. According to the BuzzFeed report, Carr is outraged by, again, the security of user data.

TikTok is not just another video app.

That’s the sheep’s clothing.

It harvests swaths of sensitive data that new reports show are being accessed in Beijing.

Tweets by Apple

Tweets by Google

TikTok is not just another video app.
That’s the sheep’s clothing.

It harvests swaths of sensitive data that new reports show are being accessed in Beijing.

I’ve called on @Apple & @Google to remove TikTok from their app stores for its pattern of surreptitious data practices. pic.twitter.com/Le01fBpNjn

— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) June 28, 2022

"It is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable risk to national security due to its large data collection, which is combined with Beijing's access to this confidential data. 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 wrote.

A few hours before the tweet was published, TikTok reported the transfer of American user data to Oracle's internal servers.

Earlier, a BuzzFeed report reported the recording of an internal meeting in September 2021, in which a TikTok employee said that an unnamed ByteDance engineer had "access to everything." Thus, Chinese employees had access to data from American users at least from September 2021 to January 2022.

Carr stressed that the app's video features are just a cover, and TikTok itself collects "everything from search and browsing history to keystroke patterns and biometric face and voice IDs."