Colorado Democratic Senator Michael Bennett on Thursday called on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores over national security concerns.
Bennett, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote to the CEO of Alphabet, the parent company of Apple and Google. Or curate your content to close to a third of the population. ”
TikTok, which is owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance, has faced questions about its data handling and whether it sends information about Americans it collects from its app to Chinese authorities.
“It would be irresponsible to make it available the old way, and I hope Apple and Google take this opportunity to lead this discussion,” Bennett said in a phone interview.
His letters to Apple’s Tim Cook and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai show the Democrats’ eager participation in a campaign that until recently was led by the Republican Party. Bennett’s call is a reminder of the Trump administration’s efforts to ban TikTok and WeChat, another Chinese-owned app, from US app stores in September 2020. The move met with legal resistance and was ultimately unsuccessful.
Lawmakers and regulators have stepped up criticism of TikTok as they wait for the Biden administration to respond to the plans it filed in August.Oversight of the platform.
Brooke Oberwetter, a spokesperson for TikTok, said the letter relied on “misleading press coverage about TikTok, the data we collect, and data security controls.” She also added that she ignored the company’s large investment in a plan known as “Project Texas.”
Google and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
More than 20 states, including several states led by Democratic governors, have banned TikTok in some form in the past two months. It was to ban the app for people. Some college campuses and cities have also adopted the ban.
Lawmakers have expressed concern over China’s media law, which allows the government to secretly request data from Chinese businesses and citizens, and TikTok’s content recommendation system.
TikTok said its plan “meaningfully addresses security concerns raised at both the federal and state levels.” I agreed to attend a House committee.
