US Government wants the TikTok app removed from Google and Apple app stores over data concerns

TikTok is being hunted again!

From been accused as responsible for the widespread misinformation causing political tensions to encouraging dangerous acts its users call “Challenge,” the short-video sharing platform is now being accused of harvesting swaths of sensitive data that are being accessed in Beijing.

The United States Federal Communications Commissioner, Brendan Carr, wrote to Apple and Google on Tuesday, requesting both companies to remove TikTok from their app stores for “its pattern of surreptitious data practices.”

The US Commissioner alleged that the short-video networking platform isn’t just an app for sharing funny memes or videos but a “sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data.”

TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance — an organization that is beholden to the Communist Party of China and required by the Chinese law to comply with PRC’s surveillance demands,” Carr said in a letter addressed to Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook of Google and Apple respectively.

“It is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due to its extensive data harvesting being combined with Beijing’s apparently unchecked access to that sensitive data.”

Last week, BuzzFeed News reported that ByteDance’s employees had repeatedly accessed data about US TikTok users. The report cited leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings and said engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022.

This is not the first time that TikTok’s user data practices have come under suspicion. Reacting to the latest controversy, a TikTok spokesperson said the company aims to remove any doubt about the security of US users’ data.

“That’s why we hire experts in their fields, who continually work to validate our security standards and bring in reputable, independent third-parties to test our defenses,” the spokesperson was quoted in reports.

In 2020, India banned TikTok over national security concerns, and both Donald Trump and his successor, Joe Biden, have raised questions about the short video app’s relations with China and how it affects US users’ data.

Recently, TikTok said it moved US users’ data to Oracle servers within the country. In a blog post, the company said it has “changed the default storage location of US users’ data” to Oracle and that “100% of US user traffic” is now hosted by the cloud provider.