This is an interesting story and we will have to watch to see where it goes.
One FCC commissioner sent a letter to Apple and Google asking/telling them to remove TikTok from their app stores. The commissioner, one of the Republicans, Brendan Carr, said “it is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due to its extensive data harvesting being combined with Beijing’s apparently unchecked access to that sensitive data”.
In September of last year TikTok said that they had a billion active users globally.
Personally, I think that all social media is just a way to grab as much of your information as possible and given the link between TikTok and the Chinese government, that is not a good thing. But that is just me.
The problem is that if you pull the app, you are going to have a billion unhappy people. Yes there is a revenue component, but that is not the biggest concern, I suspect, that Apple and Google have.
If users can’t get a legitimate copy of the app, they will figure out how to side load it and there are all kinds of malware that could, possibly, come with that.
TikTok says that they don’t share their data with the Chinese government, but in light of recent audio recordings that were released, no sane person believes that any more, if they ever did.
TikTok is trying to get ahead of this (good luck TikTok) by finally moving U.S. users’ data to Oracle cloud servers in the U.S., but that is just a smokescreen. The real issue is who has access to that data, wherever it is located.
It appears that this one commissioner went rogue and sent this letter without the commission’s approval or a vote (as best I can tell, anyway). He did send it on FCC letterhead. Is this legal? Does it meet the rules of the FCC? Does the FCC even have the power under the law to tell a private company what software they can sell? My guess is none of these can be answered yes, but is the politics enough to get Google and Apple to deal with a billion unhappy customers?
It is clear that there are other parts of the government that could legally ban TikTok, although as the previous presidential administration discovered, that decision would likely be tied up in court for years. Could the government get a high enough court to agree to a ban while the decision goes through the court system for a decade? The previous administration was unable to do that.
I am pretty sure the FCC does not have the power to force the issue.
Maybe this guy was just venting. Or pandering to a particular crowd. Stay tuned to see what happens.
Credit: The Hacker News
