They assure that the organization that owns the social network is indebted to the Chinese government and define it as “a sophisticated surveillance tool.”
The United States Federal Communications Commission has sent a letter to the CEOs of Apple and Google on Thursday asking them to remove the TikTok application from the App Store and Google Play stores respectively. The reason is that they consider this application to be a serious danger and a threat to US national security .
The commissioner of the institution, Brendan Carr, assures in his letter that “TikTok is not what it seems at first glance. It is not just an app to share videos or memes. It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing . It works as a sophisticated tool of surveillance that collects large amounts of personal and sensitive data .”
Carr further explains that the app collects search histories, keystroke patterns and biometric identifiers, location data, draft messages, texts, images and videos stored on the device.
It also denounces that the organization that owns TikTok, ByteDance, is indebted to the Communist Party of China and that it complies with the country’s surveillance demands in accordance with Chinese law. “A BuzzFeed News report with leaked audio recordings last week noted that ByteDance employees in Beijing have repeatedly accessed sensitive data TikTok has collected from Americans.”
According to the letter, TikTok has repeatedly violated the privacy requirements of both operating systems and claims that the app on Apple’s App Store was accessing its users’ sensitive information, including passwords, cryptocurrency wallet addresses and personal messages .
The social network has more than 40 million users in the United States . In Spain there are almost nine million. Several US federal security institutions (Navy, Army, Air Force or Coast Guard), have forced their officials to remove the app from their personal phones .
The two big technology companies have until July 8 to answer.