Brendan Carr, the FCC commissioner, said in
a letter to the CEOs, dated June 24 and sent on FCC letterhead, that
video-sharing app TikTok has collected vast troves of sensitive data about US
users that could be accessed by ByteDance staff in Beijing. ByteDance is
TikTok's Chinese parent.
Carr tweeted details of the letter on
Tuesday.
"TikTok is not just another video app.
That's the sheep's clothing," Carr said on Twitter. "It harvests
swaths of sensitive data that new reports show are being accessed in Beijing."
Carr asked the companies to either remove
TikTok from their app stores by July 8 or explain to him why they did not plan
to do so.
Carr's request is unusual given that the
FCC does not have clear jurisdiction over the content of app stores. The FCC regulates
the national security space usually through its authority to grant certain
communications licenses to companies.
A TikTok spokeswoman said the company's
engineers in locations outside of the United States, including China, can be
granted access to US user data "on an as-needed basis" and under
"strict controls."
Google declined comment on Carr's letter,
while Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
TikTok has been under US regulatory
scrutiny over its collection of US personal data. The Committee on Foreign
Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews deals by foreign
acquirers for potential national security risks, ordered ByteDance in 2020 to
divest TikTok because of fears that US user data could be passed on to China's
communist government.
To address these concerns, TikTok said
earlier this month that it migrated the information of its US users to servers
at Oracle.
A spokesperson for the US Department of the
Treasury, which chairs CFIUS, did not immediately respond to a request for
comment.
"What we're seeing here from
Commissioner Carr is a suggestion that at least some parts of the US government
don't think that this is enough," Richard Sofield, a national security
partner at law firm Vinson & Elkins LLP, said about TikTok's partnership
with Oracle. © Reuters