US: Senator calls on Apple and Google to block Tik Tok from app stores

Within the month the House of Representatives will vote on banning Tik Tok in the United States.

The removal of Tik Tok, owned by the Chinese ByteDance, from the “application stores” of Apple and Google was underlined in a related letter by Senator Michael Bennet, to the intelligence committee, according to information transmitted by Reuters. The senator went ahead with this proposal as he states that the social networking app in question is a national security risk.

The app, which Congress has already banned from government mobile devices, has come under increasing criticism over concerns that China’s government could use it to collect data on Americans or advance Chinese interests.

“No company subject to the dictates of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) should have the power to amass such extensive data on the American people or curate content on nearly a third of our population,” Bennett wrote in the letter. to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook. “Given these risks, I urge you to remove TikTok from your respective app stores immediately,” he wrote.

Before Bennet’s letter, Republicans had largely led the way on the issue of TikTok and national security concerns, although Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin had previously urged Americans to stop using the app.

In the now Republican-held House of Representatives, the Foreign Affairs Committee plans to hold a vote this month on a bill to ban the use of TikTok in the United States, the committee confirmed.

In 2020, then-President Donald Trump attempted to block new users from downloading TikTok and ban other transactions that would effectively block TikTok’s use in the United States, but the move was rejected by the courts.

For its part, the company says the Chinese government cannot access US citizens’ personal data or manipulate the app’s content.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is set to appear before the US House Energy and Commerce Committee in March.