Senator urges Apple and Google to ban TikTok from app stores

Col­orado Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tor Michael Ben­net, a mem­ber of the Sen­ate Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee, has sent let­ters to Apple and Google urg­ing them to ban Tik­Tok from their respec­tive app shops.

In his let­ter, Ben­nett said, “Tik­Tok, in its cur­rent form… is an unac­cept­able threat to the nation­al secu­ri­ty of the Unit­ed States.”

The let­ter, addressed to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sun­dar Pichai, echoes the same points made by oth­er law­mak­ers call­ing for the app to be banned.

Specif­i­cal­ly, Ben­nett said Tik­Tok’s par­ent com­pa­ny, ByteDance, could be forced to “use influ­ence to advance the inter­ests of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment” through TikTok.

“Like many social media plat­forms, Tik­Tok col­lects vast amounts of sophis­ti­cat­ed data about its users, includ­ing faces and voice­prints,” Ben­nett wrote.

“Unlike most social media plat­forms, Tik­Tok has its own con­cerns because Chi­nese law requires its Bei­jing-based par­ent com­pa­ny ByteDance to “sup­port, assist and coop­er­ate with nation­al intel­li­gence activities.” ”

Tik­Tok has long denied such a sce­nario is pos­si­ble and has tried to down­play its rela­tion­ship with China.

“Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Sen­a­tor Ben­net­t’s let­ter is based sole­ly on mis­lead­ing infor­ma­tion about Tik­Tok, the data we col­lect, and our data secu­ri­ty con­trols,” Tik­Tok spokesper­son Brooke Ober­wet­ter said in a state­ment. says.

“We have also done a great deal to pro­vide our com­mu­ni­ty with addi­tion­al assur­ances about the secu­ri­ty of data and the integri­ty of the Tik­Tok plat­form through Project Texas, a plan that we nego­ti­at­ed with our coun­try’s lead­ing nation­al secu­ri­ty experts. invest­ments are also neglected.