FCC commissioner Brendan Carr, one of four members of the FCC leadership team, took the initiative to reach out to both Apple and Google regarding the status of TikTok this past week. Carr delivered a letter to both Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, requesting that TikTok be banned from each platform. Specifically, Carr says that TikTok’s “patter of surreptitious data practices” breaks both platforms’ own rules and thus should be removed.
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Carr was prompted to write the letter following a report release recently from BuzzFeed News. Carr describes the report as making clear TikTok developer ByteDance has “repeatedly accessed the sensitive data that TikTok has collected from Americans.” One TikTok official even went so far as to say that “Everything is seen in China,” which Carr says is directly contradictory to prior statements regarding what data is collected through TikTok’s app.
TikTok poses an “unacceptable security risk” due to “Beijing’s apparently unchecked access to that sensitive data,” according to Carr. His letter would go on to cite what Carr believes to be specific allegations of TikTok failing to comply with Apple App Store and Google Play Store policies. These accusations include circumventing privacy safeguards, accessing passwords and private messages, and lawsuit settlements tied to collecting personal data and where that data is stored.
Why Carr decided to directly contact both Apple and Google instead of working within the FCC to further investigate the issue isn’t clear. Carr was nominated for the FCC by President Donald Trump and approved by the then-Republican senate. The Trump administration even went so far as to issue an Executive Order driving ByteDance to sell to an American company, followed by a ban that has since failed in US courts before being revoked by President Biden.
While there are questions regarding Carr politicizing the issue of TikTok for an unclear agenda, TikTok’s willingness and ability to collect personal data from its users is growing increasingly certain. However, that isn’t unique to TikTok. Similar accusations have been made against Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media platforms, to varying degrees. If Carr believes collecting data is a bannable offense on iOS and Android, then TikTok isn’t the only app that Apple and Google would have to ban.
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