Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colorado, on Thursday called on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores due to national security concerns, as bipartisan pressure mounts on the Chinese-owned company.
Mr. Bennet, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sent the CEOs of Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, a letter saying that no company subject to the “dictates of the Chinese Communist Party should have the power to amass such extensive data on the American people. or curate content for almost a third of our population.”
TikTok, owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance, has faced questions about its data practices and whether it is passing on information about Americans collected from its app to Chinese authorities.
“It is irresponsible of us to make it available the way we have, and I hope Apple and Google take this opportunity to lead this discussion,” Bennett said in a phone interview.
His letter to Apple’s Tim Cook and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai — the latest jab at TikTok in what has become a national frenzy among lawmakers — shows Democrats eagerly joining a campaign that until recently was spearheaded in largely by Republicans. Mr Bennet’s call traces back to the Trump administration’s effort to ban TikTok and WeChat, another Chinese-owned app, from US app stores in September 2020, a move that met with legal resistance and ultimately failed. .
Lawmakers and regulators have increasingly criticized TikTok as it waits for the Biden administration to respond to the company’s plan, laid out in August, detailing how it will prevent the Chinese government from accessing US user data. and how it will provide the US government with oversight of the platform.
More than two dozen states, including several led by Democratic governors, have banned TikTok in some way in the past two months. A bipartisan bill introduced in Congress in December would ban the app for everyone in the United States. Some college campuses and cities have also adopted bans.
Lawmakers have raised concerns about a Chinese media law that allows the government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens and TikTok’s content recommendation system.
TikTok has said that its plan will “significantly address any security concerns that have been raised at both the federal and state levels.” Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok, agreed appear before a House committee in March.
