Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr has asked Google and Apple to remove popular social media app TikTok from their application stores, saying that the app “harvests swaths of sensitive data that new reports show are being accessed in Beijing.”
Carr cited a Buzzfeed News report based on leaked audio from internal TikTok meetings which included statements that, despite assurances from TikTok that it has regionalized data access and a U.S.-based security team to handle issues, “[indicate] that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least.” The story went on to say that U.S.-based engineers were not able to access user data independently.
