Author: Geoffrey Ejiga
The Federal Communications Commission has beckoned Google and Apple to remove the popular video-sharing platform TikTok from their app stores.
We did some digging and found what the FCC commissioner had to say regarding why TikTok should be removed and if the video=sharing application is unsafe.
Let’s find out!
What the FCC is saying about TikTok
Brendan Carr, who’s the commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), wrote to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Burton on an alarming new Buzzfeed report that exposed how TikTok poses a serious national security threat.
Carr cites the reports as evidence that “due to TikTok’s aggressive data harvesting coupled with Beijings’ unregulated access to this sensitive data, the video sharing platform possesses an unacceptable national security risk”
According to Carr, “TikTok is much different from how it appears on the surface, it is not just an app for sharing videos and memes, that’s just the sheep’s clothing. TikTok mainly functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool for harvesting large amounts of people’s sensitive and personal data”.
ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, a company Carr argues is “beholden to the Communist Party of China and is required by Chinese law to comply with the PRC’s demands”.
In the letter, Carr expressed major privacy concerns over the security of data collected from millions of U.S citizens.
Why do they want to remove TikTok?
Carr highlighted that TikTok collects “everything” from browsing and search histories, location data, keystroke patterns, metadata, message drafts, voiceprints, data saved on the keyboard, and biometrics.
The report also analyzed leaked audio from more than 80 internal Tiktok meetings and discovered that non-public U.S user data had been accessed by engineers at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.
Furthermore, US-based TikTok engineers didn’t know how to – and didn’t have authority to access the data, and depended on their Chinese counterparts to access the data, according to Buzzfeed.
Carr argues that TikTok hasn’t complied with Google and Apple rules because of the company’s “pattern of conduct and its misinterpretations regarding the unrestricted access that persons in Beijing have to sensitive data.
There are claims of a director in TikTok’s safety and trust department saying a colleague in China is a “Master Admin” and has access to “everything”. A member in another meeting allegedly said “Everything is seen in China”
Carr has requested the CEOs to respond by explaining the company’s conclusion on the access of private US user data by persons in Beijing and on TikTok’s trend of misleading representations and conduct.
Is TikTok Unsafe?
Data collection is not an issue for applications that clearly state they’re practicing this, but they must explain how the data collected is used. It seems TikTok isn’t among the apps that stick to this clause.
For example, Section 5.1.2(i) of the Apple App Store Review Guidelines states that an app developer must always provide access to the information regarding where and how users’ data will be used and collected, plus whether the app shares data with third parties to improve the app (or for advertising purposes).
ByteDance, called Douyin in China, is required by Chinese law to abide by the PRC’s surveillance requests and review demands.
A final word
According to claims, Tiktok is breaking numerous Apple App and Google Play store rules by breaching major privacy concerns for over 80 million United States users.
Although Carr cannot force Google or Apple to remove TikTok from their stores, he has called on these big tech companies to “ hold themselves as functioning app stores that are globally trusted and remain safe to download apps”.
By giving data access to “persons in Beijing”, TikTok poses a national security threat, and together with the company’s conduct over recent months, TikTok has made it hard for users to trust the company’s policies.
As mentioned earlier, collecting data is not an issue, the problem, however, is being unclear about how user data is collected, and where such data is used.