US FCC boss Brendan Carr wants Google, Apple to ban TikTok from app stores; here's why

US Federal Communications Commission (US FCC) chief Brendan Carr has warned in a series of tweets that the short video app TikTok is “not just another video app” and that this needs careful monitoring. He claimed the app has sensitive data that, and according to reports, this data is being accessed in Beijing.  

Carr, through Twitter, also shared a letter he has written to Apple's CEO Tim Cook and the CEO of Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Sundar Pichai, in which the watchdog head pointed out that the ByteDance-owned short video app was not compliant with the two companies' app store policies, calling for both Apple and Google to remove the popular Chinese app from their stores. 

In this letter, he wrote, “Indeed, statistics show that TikTok has been downloaded in the US from the Apple App store and the Google Play store nearly 19 million times in the first quarter of this year alone. 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 further underscored, “Numerous provisions of the Apple App Store and Google Play Store policies are relevant to TikTok’s pattern of surreptitious data practices—a pattern that runs contrary to its repeated representations.” 

But how does TikTok do this? 

According to Carr’s letter, TikTok collects everything—be it search and browsing histories or biometric identifiers like faceprints—which can be used in facial recognition technology and voiceprints. It also collects location data, draft messages, metadata and text, images and videos stored on a device’s clipboard.  

He further claimed, “Within its own borders, the PRC has developed some of the most invasive and omnipresent surveillance capabilities in the world to maintain authoritarian control.” He also cited numerous instances where US officials, independent cybersecurity experts and privacy and civil rights groups.  

Carr also punctured TikTok’s claim of moving US users’ data to Oracle servers located in the US as he said that those claims don’t provide any protection against the data being accessed from Beijing, while adding this claim that it “says nothing about where that data can be accessed from”.