FCC’s Brendan Carr Asks Apple, Google to Remove TikTok App

Brendan Carr, the senior Republican and the previous General Counsel on the Federal Communications Commission, sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai asking that they stop carrying the TikTok app. 

Carr shared the letter, dated Friday (June 24) on FCC letterhead, in a tweet on Tuesday (June 28), which stated that the Chinese app sparks fresh data security concerns and also violates some tenets of the app store policies of both iOS and Android. 

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

See also: TikTok Agrees to Improve EU Consumer Rights, Avoiding Potential Sanctions

The letter points to a June 17 BuzzFeed news report referring to leaked audio recordings indicating that engineers in China had access to U.S. data between September 2021 and January 2022. 

“Everything is seen in China,” a TikTok official reportedly said in the recordings, per the letter. TikTok has repeatedly maintained that the data it gathers about Americans is stored in the U.S. 

“We know we’re among the most scrutinized platforms from a security standpoint, and we aim to remove any doubt about the security of U.S. user data. That’s why we hire experts in their fields, continually work to validate our security standards, and bring in reputable, independent third parties to test our defenses,” a TikTok spokesperson told BuzzFeed. 

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If Apple and Alphabet neglect to remove TikTok, Carr said in the letter that he expects to hear from them by July 8 explaining “the basis for your company’s conclusion that the surreptitious access of private and sensitive U.S. user data by persons located in Beijing, coupled with TikTok’s pattern of misleading representations and conduct, does not run afoul of any of your app store policies,” per the letter. 

Owned by Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok faced scrutiny under then-President Donald Trump, who had sought to ban the app over data collection and possible use by China’s government that could pose a threat to U.S. national security. Carr was nominated for a five-year term with the FCC by Trump in 2018.