A Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission has urged the chief executives of Apple and Alphabet’s Google to kick Chinese-owned TikTookay out of its app shops.

Brendan Carr, the FCC commissioner, mentioned in a letter to the CEOs, dated June 24 and despatched on FCC letterhead, that video-sharing app TikTookay has collected huge troves of delicate knowledge about US customers that could possibly be accessed by ByteDance workers in Beijing. ByteDance is TikTookay’s Chinese guardian.

Carr tweeted particulars of the letter on Tuesday.

“TikTok is not just another video app. That’s the sheep’s clothing,” Carr mentioned on Twitter. “It harvests swaths of sensitive data that new reports show are being accessed in Beijing.”

Carr requested the businesses to both take away TikTookay from their app shops by July 8 or clarify to him why they didn’t plan to take action.

Carr’s request is uncommon provided that the FCC doesn’t have clear jurisdiction over the content material of app shops. The FCC regulates the nationwide safety area normally via its authority to grant sure communications licenses to corporations.

A TikTookay spokeswoman mentioned the corporate’s engineers in areas exterior of the United States, together with China, will be granted entry to US person knowledge “on an as-needed basis” and beneath “strict controls.”

Google declined touch upon Carr’s letter, whereas Apple didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

TikTookay has been beneath US regulatory scrutiny over its assortment of US private knowledge. The Committee on Foreign Investment within the United States (CFIUS), which evaluations offers by overseas acquirers for potential nationwide safety dangers, ordered ByteDance in 2020 to divest TikTookay due to fears that US person knowledge could possibly be handed on to China’s communist authorities.

To tackle these issues, TikTookay mentioned earlier this month that it migrated the knowledge of its US customers to servers at Oracle.

A spokesperson for the US Department of the Treasury, which chairs CFIUS, didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

“What we’re seeing here from Commissioner Carr is a suggestion that at least some parts of the US government don’t think that this is enough,” Richard Sofield, a nationwide safety companion at legislation agency Vinson & Elkins LLP, mentioned about TikTookay’s partnership with Oracle.

© Thomson Reuters 2022