Senate intelligence leaders called on the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday to investigate whether China-owned video app TikTok misleads the public about whether Beijing has access to US user data. rice field.
of letter FTC Chair Lina Khan, Democratic Senator Mark Warner, who heads the Intelligence Commission, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, the panel’s top Republican, said TikTok’s user data is parent company ByteDance in China. Employees. They also said they were worried that ByteDance might be more involved in TikTok’s decision making than the app had claimed in the past.
“We encourage you to respond quickly to this issue in the light of TikTok’s repeated misrepresentations of data security, data processing, and corporate governance practices,” said the legislator.
The FTC spokesman did not immediately respond to the request for comment. FTC has the authority to investigate cases where a company makes deceptive claims about its practices. The agency reached an agreement with TikTok in 2019 to resolve allegations that a previous iteration of the app incorrectly collected child’s personal data.
For years, TikTok has been faced with questions from US authorities as to whether it poses a national security threat because it is owned by a Chinese company. In 2020, President Donald J. Trump quoted these security concerns and demanded that video apps be sold if left in the US app store. He later announced a potential deal for ByteDance to sell at least part of TikTok to the US tech company Oracle, but that deal didn’t happen.
These questions ended after Mr. Trump resigned, but have recently come to the fore again. Last month, BuzzFeed News report ByteDance employees in China have been able to access US data for the app this year and have had a hard time blocking the information collected by the app.
After the BuzzFeed report, nine Republican senators, including Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee and John Thune in South Dakota Written on TikTok With a question about that security practice. Last month, Federal Communications Commission members also said that Apple and Google need to remove TikTok from the app store. And last week, TikTok sent a letter to US lawmakers detailing how to separate data about US users from their Chinese parent company.
