US regulator wants Apple and Google to remove TikTok from app stores

A member of the United States’ Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is renewing calls for Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, citing national security concerns surrounding the Chinese parent company of the TikTok, ByteDance.

In a June 24 letter to Apple and Google CEOs, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr described ByteDance as “in debt” to the Chinese government and “required by law to comply with the Chinese government’s surveillance demands.”

Citing a recent report by BuzzFeed News that ByteDance’s Chinese team had accessed US TikTok user data on multiple occasions, Carr said the allegations showed how TikTok is “out of compliance with the policies that both companies require. all apps follow”.

Apple and Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement, TikTok called the BuzzFeed report “misleading.”

“Like many global companies, TikTok has engineering teams around the world,” TikTok said.

“We employ access controls such as encryption and security monitoring to protect user data, and the access approval process is overseen by our US-based security team. TikTok has consistently maintained that our engineers at locations outside the US, including China, can be given access to US user data as needed under these strict controls.”

In a statement, Buzzfeed News said that it “is categorically behind our reporting that US user data was accessed by TikTok employees in China far more often than previously known, and we are happy that the TikTok has confirmed this in its own statement.”

For years, US officials have expressed concern that the Chinese government’s access to US user data or communications could jeopardize national security.

But whether Carr’s appeal will work is uncertain.

The FCC plays no role in regulating internet-based services such as app stores, and previous efforts by the US government to ban TikTok from US app stores have failed amid legal challenges.

Decisions on how and whether the FCC should act would require the buy-in of President Jessica Rosenworcel, who leads the independent federal agency.

On the same day as the BuzzFeed report, TikTok announced that it had migrated its US user data to US-based Oracle cloud servers and that it would end up excluding backups of its US user data from its own proprietary servers.

Carr wrote in his letter that he was not insured by the ad.

“TikTok has long claimed that its US user data was stored on servers in the US, and yet these representations did not provide protection against the data being accessed from Beijing,” he said.

“In fact, TikTok’s statement that ‘100% of US user traffic is being routed to Oracle’ says nothing about where this data can be accessed from.”

— CNN’s Oliver Darcy contributed to this story.