Request to remove TikTok from App Store and Google Play
The popular video app, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, came under the spotlight during Donald Trump’s presidency.
According to Aetna from Isna, now Brendan Carr, one of the commissioners of the US Federal Communications Commission, published a letter on Twitter that he sent to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. In this letter, reports and cases are mentioned that show Tik Tok in violation of the policies of the application stores of these two companies.
In this letter, he wrote: Tik Tok is not what it seems. Tik Tok is not just an app for sharing fun videos. This is just the appearance of the story and Tik Tok basically acts as an advanced surveillance tool that collects a large amount of personal and sensitive information.
The working letter, sent on June 24 on Federal Communications Commission letterhead, states: If Apple and Alphabet do not remove Tik Tok from their app store, they must provide statements to it by July 8. In these statements, it should be explained how these companies came to the decision that the covert access of people based in China to the private and confidential information of American users and the misleading behavioral patterns of Tik Tok are not against their app store policies.
In 2018, Trump appointed Brendan Carr to a five-year term on the Federal Communications Commission, and the Senate in December confirmed Jessica Rosenworsel to serve another five years.
In his letter, this commission official mentioned the BuzzFeed News report, according to which, Tik Tok employees’ statements show that engineers in China had access to American data between September 2021 and January 2022.
According to the CNBC report, on the same day that the BuzzFeed report was published, Tik Tok announced that it will transfer the traffic of its American users to Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, and the private information of American users from its data centers in the United States and Singapore to cloud servers. Oracle delivers in the US.