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The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee requested the Federal Commerce Fee on Tuesday to analyze whether or not TikTok, the Chinese language-owned video app, had misled the general public about whether or not Beijing may have entry to American consumer knowledge.
In a letter to Lina Khan, the chair of the F.T.C., Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat who heads the Intelligence Committee, and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the panel’s high Republican, mentioned they have been involved about latest experiences that TikTok’s consumer knowledge was accessible to staff of its dad or mum firm, ByteDance, in China. Additionally they mentioned they have been apprehensive that ByteDance was extra concerned in TikTok’s determination making than the app had claimed prior to now.
“In mild of repeated misrepresentations by TikTok regarding its knowledge safety, knowledge processing and company governance practices, we urge you to behave promptly on this matter,” the lawmakers mentioned.
A spokesman for the F.T.C. didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark. The F.T.C. has the authority to analyze situations through which corporations make misleading claims about their practices. The company reached an settlement with TikTok in 2019 to settle accusations that an earlier iteration of the app had wrongly collected youngsters’s private knowledge.
For years, TikTok has confronted questions from U.S. officers about whether or not it poses a nationwide safety risk as a result of a Chinese language firm owns it. In 2020, President Donald J. Trump cited these safety issues and demanded that the video app be bought if it was to stay in U.S. app shops. He later introduced a possible deal through which ByteDance would promote no less than a part of TikTok to Oracle, a U.S. tech firm, although the transaction by no means got here to fruition.
These questions tailed off after Mr. Trump left workplace, however have just lately come to the fore once more. Final month, BuzzFeed Information reported that ByteDance staff in China had gained entry to the app’s U.S. knowledge as just lately as this yr and that staff have been struggling to cordon off info collected by the app.
After the BuzzFeed report, 9 Republican senators — together with Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and John Thune of South Dakota — wrote to TikTok with questions on its safety practices. Final month, a member of the Federal Communications Fee additionally mentioned Apple and Google ought to take away TikTok from their app shops. And final week, TikTok despatched U.S. lawmakers a letter detailing the way it deliberate to maintain knowledge about its American customers separate from its Chinese language dad or mum firm.
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Supply- nytimes