Tensions between China and the United States have recently reached an all-time high. And these extremely tense relations worsened following the scandal around the data collected by TikTok these last months. US authorities are now taking action…
Thus, the future of the social network at Uncle Sam could be compromised.
A case that makes a lot of noise
It’s a little bomb published by BuzzFeed who set fire to the powder on June 18th. Indeed, an article published by the site told us that ByteDance, the Chinese firm responsible for TikTok, obtained a large volume of data from the United States. Through an audio recording, nine employees of the company claimed to have free access to non-public information about American users.
This would notably include biometric identifiers or browsing histories, and even facial and voice prints. TikTok then rushed to respond by migrating all data to national servers run by Oracle. But this desperate attempt to put out the fire obviously did not help much.
The main tech players contacted
This week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) goes even further through its commissioner, Brendan Carr. This member of the Republican Party sent a letter to Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, and Sundar Pichai, the boss of Google. He asks them to remove TikTok from their respective online store altogether. Carr views the app as dangerous and capable of ” collect pieces of sensitive data belonging to US users.
The main interested party also mentions the fact that TikTok goes so far as to represent ” an unacceptable risk to national security due to its intensive data collection “. And since plans to sell the social network to an American company have come to nothing, the FCC is insisting on removing the application. It remains to be seen whether this request will be followed by facts.
On the same subject :
TikTok says it wants to entertain you, unlike Facebook which wants to connect you
Source : Apple Insider
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