The administrations change, but obviously not the attitude of the United States towards TikTok. The popular app is back in the crosshairs of the US authorities, after the long battle waged against social media by the Trump government. This time to point the index towards TikTok is Brendan Carrcommissioner of the FCCwith a simple and clear request addressed to Apple and Google: remove the TikTok app from the App Store and Google Play. The two companies have until July 8 to respond.
The reasons are similar to those used by Trump to ask for a ban on TikTok in the United States: theapp would be a personal data collection tool on behalf of the Chinese authorities. On this point, Carr states:
Last week, an alarming new report shed new light on the serious national security threats posed by TikTok. As you know, TikTok is an app available to millions of Americans through your app stores and collects immense amounts of sensitive data from these US users. TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, an organization that is linked to the Communist Party of China and required by Chinese law to comply with the surveillance demands of the People’s Republic of China.
Search and browsing history, typing patterns, biometric identifiers (including fingerprints and voice), location, draft messages and metadata, texts, images and videos. These are the precious personal data that would end up directly under the control of the Beijing authorities, as the FCC commissioner points out.
Apple and Google should delete TikTok from their respective stores even if they don’t share the idea that TikTok is the longa manus of the Chinese governmentcontinues Brendan Carr. The app would still violate the rules of the two stores by transferring a large amount of personal data of American citizens to China, without however informing them in detail what data it is.
All of the above within days of the reassurances provided by ByteDance about the security of US user data of TikTok thanks to the collaboration with Oracle and the BuzzFeed News report (quoted by Carr) which, on the contrary, showed that the Chinese employees of ByteDance still have continuous access to such data. For the time being, neither Apple nor Google have responded to the FCC’s appeal.
