New stage in the conflict between the American government and the Chinese application TikTok. Under Donald Trump, the popular app was accused of spying for Beijing (because it’s owned by the ByteDance group) and was told to find a way to fly locally under the US flag or risk being banned.

TikTok is not just another video app. That’s the sheep’s clothing. It harvests swaths of sensitive data that new reports show are being accessed in Beijing. I’ve called on @Apple

The debate is now back on the table after the revelations of a Buzzfeed article reported by our colleagues from BFMTV. The American site claims that the personal data accumulated by the application for hundreds of millions of users in the country are scrutinized very closely in China. In the Buzzfeed article, internal audio recordings explicitly ensure that data stored on US servers is accessible in China. In particular, we hear a member of TikTok’s “Trust and Safety” committee affirm that “everything is seen in China”.

Thus, Brendan Carr, head of the Federal Communications Commission, published a letter on Twitter addressed to Apple and Google, solemnly calling on them to ban TikTok from their application store (Play Strore and App Store respectively). “TikTok isn’t just another video app,” he says, “it’s the wolf in sheep’s clothing. It collects quantities of sensitive data, which are, according to new documents, accessible in Beijing. TikTok doesn’t just see its users dancing on video. »

The commissioner adds that “the app collects search history, records keystrokes, biometrics, text drafts and metadata. Moreover, it collects the texts, images and videos that are saved on the app by the users”. Brendan Carr is asking the two giants to communicate, by July 8, their possible reasons for not removing TikTok from their catalog.