Technology
FCC commissioner urges U.S. government to ban TikTok over privacy issues
TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese technology company ByteDance, is required by law to share its data with the CCP if requested
November 2, 2022 6:49am
Updated: November 2, 2022 1:25pm
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Brendan Carr said on Tuesday that the U.S. should ban the social media platform TikTok to protect the data of American Citizens.
In an interview with Axios, Carr, one of the five commissioners that lead the FCC, said that there is no way to know whether the data of Americans using the app is not being sent to Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese technology company ByteDance, is required by law to share its data with the CCP if requested.
Currently, the popular social media platform that has more than 200 million downloads in the U.S. alone is litigating with the U.S. Council on Foreign Investment (CFIUS) to determine whether there is a way to divest the app from ByteDance and allow it to operate in the U.S.
However, Carr claims that even if a deal is reached, data protections will not be secure enough. Any data flowing back to China could potentially be used to influence political processes in the United States, he added.
"I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban," he told Axios, adding that there isn't "a world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it’s not finding its way back into the hands of the CCP."
TikTok responded to Carr’s claims by arguing that the commissioner did not have a role in the litigation with CFIUS.
"Commissioner Carr has no role in the confidential discussions with the U.S. government related to TikTok and appears to be expressing views independent of his role as an FCC commissioner," TikTok told Axios in a Tuesday statement. "We are confident that we are on a path to reaching an agreement with the U.S. Government that will satisfy all reasonable national security concerns."
TikTok has repeatedly expressed that their users’ data is safe, despite admitting that the data is accessible to Chinese government officials.
