A commissioner of the FCC wants to ban TikTok.
Brendan Carr, one of the four FCC leadership team members, took the initiative this past week to contact both Apple and Google about the status of TikTok. Carr delivered a letter asking the removal of TikTok from each platform to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. Particularly, Carr claims that TikTok’s “pattern of covert data practices” violates the policies of both platforms and must be stopped.
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
Due to “Beijing’s apparently unlimited access to such sensitive data,” TikTok poses a “intolerable security risk,” in Carr’s opinion. Carr’s letter continued by citing what he thinks to be specific claims that TikTok had broken rules set forth by the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Allegations of violating privacy protections, gaining access to passwords and private messages, and lawsuit settlements related to the gathering of personal data and the storage of that data are among those mentioned. It’s unclear why Carr chose to speak with Apple and Google directly rather than conducting additional research within the FCC. President Donald Trump proposed Carr for the FCC, and the Republican-controlled senate supported his nomination. The Trump administration even went so far as to issue an Executive Order pressuring ByteDance to sell to an American firm, followed by a prohibition that has since failed in US courts before being reversed by President Biden.
Although there are concerns that Carr politicized the TikTok issue for an ambiguous objective, it is becoming more and more evident that TikTok is eager to acquire personal data from its customers. That isn’t specific to TikTok, though. To differing degrees, similar charges have been leveled against Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networking sites. TikTok wouldn’t be the only app that Apple and Google would have to ban if Carr is correct in his assertion that gathering data is a punishable infraction on iOS and Android.
