- FCC commissioner cites national security concerns regarding TikTok’s Chinese parent company.
- The commissioner sent a letter to the CEOs of Apple and Google on June 24.
- BuzzFeed News report claimed Bytedance’s Chinese employees accessed the data of US users.
Reiterating previous demands that Apple and Google remove TikTok from their app stores, an FCC commissioner cites national security concerns regarding TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr referred to ByteDance as “beholden” to the Chinese government and “mandated by law to comply with [Chinese government] monitoring demands” in a letter he sent to the CEOs of Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOGL) on June 24. Carr cited a recent BuzzFeed News report that claimed ByteDance’s Chinese employees had repeatedly accessed the data of US TikTok users, saying the claims demonstrated how TikTok is “in violation of the regulations that both of your firms demand every app to adhere to.”
A request for comment was not immediately answered by Apple or Google. TikTok referred to the BuzzFeed article as “misleading” in a statement.
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According to TikTok, “like many multinational corporations, we have engineering teams all around the world.” “To protect user data, we use access restrictions including encryption and security monitoring, and our security staff in the US manages the access approval process. TikTok has consistently insisted that under these stringent limitations, our technologists working in countries like China that are outside the US can be given access to user data from such countries as needed.”
According to a statement from Buzzfeed News, “we stand firmly behind our findings that US user data was accessed by TikTok personnel stationed in China considerably more frequently than previously known, and we’re delighted that TikTok even confirmed this in its own statement.”
US officials have long expressed worry that giving the Chinese government access to data or communications from US customers could endanger national security. Carr’s argument might succeed, but that is uncertain.
Internet-based services like app stores are not regulated by the FCC, and previous attempts by the US government to remove TikTok from US app shops failed due to legal objections. Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, who oversees the independent federal agency, would need to agree on any decisions made regarding the FCC’s actions and how they should be taken.
The day after the BuzzFeed article was published, TikTok declared that it had moved its US user data to US-based Oracle cloud servers and would eventually be erasing backups of its US user data from its own proprietary servers.
Carr stated in his letter that the announcement had not given him any peace of mind. “TikTok has long asserted that its U.S. user data is held on U.S. servers, but those representations provided no security against the data being accessible from Beijing,” he stated. In fact, TikTok’s claim that “100% of US user traffic is being routed to Oracle” omits any information on how and where the data might be accessed.
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