The Commissioner of the United States Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, recently made the public declaration that the two widely-used tech giants, Apple and Google, will soon be forced to remove TikTok from all app stores. This announcement follows former President Donald Trump’s original attempt to completely dispose of the application in 2020; Trump previously appointed Carr to the FCC back in 2018, furthering his career in an exclusive government agency. This specific action is claimed to be due to having solid evidence that ‘ByteDance’s Chinese staff had access to TikTok users’ data on multiple occasions,’ disobeying the application’s guidelines to show how and where they will use personal information.
Representatives at TikTok made a public announcement this past week to let their audience know some of their side of the story: “Like many global companies, TikTok has engineering teams around the world. We employ access controls like encryption and security monitoring to secure user data, and the access approval process is overseen by our US-based security team… TikTok has consistently maintained that our engineers in locations outside of the U.S., including China, can be granted access to the U.S. user data on an as-needed basis under those strict controls.”