Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, on Thursday urged Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores as bipartisan pressure on the Chinese-owned company escalates over national security concerns.
Mr. Bennet, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to the CEOs of Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, saying that no company subject to the dictates of the Chinese Communist Party should have the power to collect such extensive data on the American people or curate content for nearly a third of our population.”
TikTok, which is owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance, has faced questions about its data practices and whether it shares information about Americans collected by its app with Chinese authorities.
“It is irresponsible of us to make it available as we have, and I hope Apple and Google will use this as an opportunity to spearhead this debate,” Mr. Bennet said in a phone interview.
His letter to Apple’s Tim Cook and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai — the final shot against TikTok in what has become one national madness among lawmakers — shows that Democrats are eagerly joining a campaign that until recently was largely Republican-led. Mr. Bennet’s call goes back to the The efforts of the Trump administration TikTok and WeChat, another Chinese-owned app, from US app stores in September 2020, a move that met with legal resistance and ultimately failed.
legislators and controller have increasingly criticized TikTok as it waits for the Biden administration to respond to the company’s plan, presented in August, detailing how it will block the Chinese government from gaining access to data on US users, and how it will offer oversight to the US government over the platform.
More than two dozen states, including several run by Democratic governors, have banned TikTok in some way over the past two months. A bipartisan bill introduced in Congress in December would ban the app for everyone in the United States. Some university campus and cities have also enacted bans.
Lawmakers have raised concerns about a Chinese media law that allows the government to secretly solicit data from Chinese companies and citizens, as well as TikTok’s content recommendation system.
TikTok said its plan will “reasonably address any security concerns that have been raised at both the federal and state levels.” Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok, has agreed appear before a House Committee March.
