FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has recently written to Apple and Google, requesting the companies to remove TikTok from their app stores for “its pattern of surreptitious data practices.” The letter comes on the heels of BuzzFeed News’ report that TikTok’s staff in China had access to U.S.-based users’ data up until January.
“As you know TikTok is an app that is available to millions of Americans through your app stores, and it collects vast troves of sensitive data about those U.S. users. 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.
“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,” he added.
After BuzzFeed News published its report, TikTok announced that it is moving all U.S. users’ data to Oracle servers situated in the country. It added that the company still uses its own U.S. and Singapore-based servers for backup. But in the future, it expects to “delete U.S. users’ private data from our own data centers and fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers located in the U.S.”
“We’re also making operational changes in line with this work — including the new department we recently established, with U.S.-based leadership, to solely manage U.S. user data for TikTok,” the company added.
This isn’t the first time TikTok’s user data practices have been in the spotlight. In 2020, India banned TikTok over national security concerns, and both former President Donald Trump and the current president Joe Biden have raised questions about the app’s relations with China and how it affects U.S. users’ data.
Whereas Trump proposed an outright ban on TikTok or an option of selling its U.S. business to a local buyer, Biden proposed new rules that will give more oversight on apps with ties to “jurisdiction of foreign adversaries” that may pose national security risks.
Chances are this saga will continue and while we do expect TikTok to abide by any new regulations that may be imposed, we still advise all our readers to use a VPN… And not only to stay safe from TikTok, but also from Google and Facebook, which will use their data to serve them more personalized ads. And then more ads.
To stop that cycle, get yourself a VPN and enjoy the Internet as it was meant to be. 😉