The IT Nerd

Last week I posted a story about a report that data from US users of TikTok was being seen in China. This despite the fact that TikTok has always claimed that this is not the case. This has now escalated to the point where FCC commissioner Brendan Carr posted this on Twitter:

I encourage you to click on the Tweet to read the letter in full. But in short, he wants TikTok gone from Apple’s App Store and Google Play for violating the terms of service and for being a data-gathering tool for the Chinese authorities. The letter gives both Apple and Google until July 8th to respond. As I type this, neither has responded and it isn’t clear what will happen if they don’t respond or pull the app. But TikTok has responded and said this:

We know we’re among the most scrutinized platforms from a security standpoint, and we aim to remove any doubt about the security of US user data. That’s why we hire experts in their fields, continually work to validate our security standards, and bring in reputable, independent third parties to test our defenses.

You’ll note that they did not directly address the accusations that were made by Carr.

My feeling is that this is about to come to a head. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this because my feeling is that this is about to blow up into something resembling the scale that we saw when Donald Trump tried to force a sale of TikTok to a US company or be banned.

This entry was posted on June 29, 2022 at 9:00 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, FCC, Google, TikTok. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.