TikTok accused of surveillance and collection of sensitive data

The social network TikTok, one of the favorites among young people, is famous among users for the interaction of videos and ‘trends’. But this emerging application could have a darker and twisted background according to digitization and the power it has: obtaining confidential personal data.

A representative of the United States Federal Communications CommissionBrendar Carr, has written a text on Twitter appealing to the CEOs of Apple, Tim Cook, and Google, Sundar Pichai, to get them to remove the TikTok app after “presenting a national security risk due to the amount of data it accumulates, combined with the apparent ease with which Beijing (China) is accessing that data,” Carr says.

In the letter, he comments that TikTok would be a kind of “sheepskin”” which hides an intention to obtain sensitive data under the appearance of the publication and interaction between users’ videos.

Thus, the rules of the platform “follow a pattern of behavior that facilitates access for Beijing users to the data of those residing in the United States,” explains Carr. For this reason, he has asked Apple and Google to remove the application from their operating systems. “TikTok is not what it appears to be on the surface,” the representative comments, “At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that collects vast amounts of personal and sensitive data.”

TikTok is not just another video app.
That’s the sheep’s clothing.

It harvests swaths of sensitive data that new reports show are being accessed in Beijing.

I’ve called on @Manzana & @Google to remove TikTok from their app stores for its pattern of surreptitious data practices. pic.twitter.com/Le01fBpNjn

— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) June 28, 2022

US crosshairs

Related news

The problem also originates from the fact that the platform’s employees in the United States cannot access such datatherefore they have to leave it in the hands of the Chinese workers. This privacy and possible breach of national security is in the point of view of the current president of the United StatesJoe Biden, and was in that of former President Donald Trump.

Trump already put a deadline on TikTok to find a buyer in the United Statesbut after several meetings with those responsible for Microsoft and Oracle, the government of the American country proclaimed Biden without having settled the matter. But the current president’s team has put in place new regulatory rules at the beginning of the year that would mean more surveillance capacity on applications such as TikTok, which can pose a risk to the country’s national security.