- Index hide
Commissioner Carr’s letter has not received a response from those facing Apple and Google.
TikTok, the Chinese platform, continues to generate controversy before the governments of the world, especially in the United States, where this Wednesday A representative from the Federal Communications Commission has asked Apple and Google to remove the popular video app from their online stores, the App Store and the Google Play Store.
The request was made through a letter posted on his Twitter account, where he tells the CEOs of Apple, Tim Cook, and Google, Sundar Pichai, that this social network “presents a national security risk.”
TikTok is the star platform worldwide and, despite being a fairly young platform, in January 2021 it was among the top 10 positions in the ranking of social networks with the highest number of active monthly users worldwide, according to an Airnow report.
However, despite Commissioner Carr’s letter, facing Apple and Google they have remained silent as their markets grow digital. According to data from Statista, the Apple App Store is not the platform with the highest number of downloads, since it registers 2 million and Google Play 2 million 200 thousand.
More infographics at Statistical
Is TikTok a national security risk for the US?
In the letter from the commissioner, Brendan Carr, explains that Tiktok “It presents a national security risk due to the amount of data it amasses, combined with the apparent ease with which Beijing is accessing that data.”
In that sense, Carr assures that Google and Apple have allowed this to Tiktok since their rules “follow a pattern of behavior that facilitates Beijing users’ access to the data of those residing in the United States.” states in his letter.
“TikTok is not what it appears to be on the surface. It’s not just an app for sharing videos or funny memes. That’s the sheep’s clothing. At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that collects vast amounts of personal and sensitive data,” Carr wrote to Cook and Pichai.
This letter and request to the largest technology companies on the planet, come when it was revealed that Tiktok supposedly has a base in some 80 audios extracted from internal meetings in the company and that the engineers from the ByteDance company in China could have accessed user data from the United States between September 2021 and January 2022.
“We know that we are among the most heavily vetted platforms from a security standpoint, and we fight to remove any doubts that may exist regarding US user data. That’s why we hire cybersecurity experts, and we’re continually working to validate our security standards, bringing in third parties to check and test our defenses.”, exposed a Tiktok representative to US media.
Also, the same day this information was leaked, Tiktok announced that one hundred percent of the traffic in the United States goes through a route created by Oracle Cloud Infrastructures.
TikTok and its problems in the US
It is not the first time that Tiktok has come to light before the politicians of the North American country, since it has been on the radar of both the Current President Joe Biden, like former President Donald Trump, for privacy and national security.
Let us remember that the Trump administration set a deadline for Tiktok to find a buyer from the United States or it would be banned in the country, but after several unsuccessful meetings and dialogues with Microsoft and Oracle, the dates have passed and the United States government has not acted on that warning.
For its part, the Biden team has also proposed new regulations for the social network at the beginning of the year, which would give the United States government greater surveillance capacity over applications that may pose a risk to national security.
This new request demonstrates the importance of the privacy and security of its nation for the United States and joins the countries of the European Union, where they have also spent months discussing the problems that many applications such as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok can cause.
In conclusion, the problem of privacy in social networks is already an important issue in the European Union, where they approved the political agreement on the Digital Services Law (LSD) and which is a milestone in the history of Internet regulation, since this regulation contemplates new norms that will force the great technology companies such as Facebook and Instagram and YouTube to assess and manage systemic risks, such as hate speech and the spread of disinformation, presented by their services.
Now read:
TikTok will gather its most viral songs on an album
Qatar 2022, the TikTok and Twitch World Cup?; this is what the creators think
Facebook wants to compete with TikTok and makes these changes to its algorithm