TikTok under fire from US senators over privacy, Chinese government ties
TikTok is taking flak from a bipartisan group of US Senators over its plans to collect users’ facial and voice biometrics, as well as recent news about its parent company’s deep connections to the Chinese government.
Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota released a letter to TikTok’s CEO on Wednesday demanding more information about the company’s plans to collect “faceprints and voiceprints” from users.
The senators said they were “alarmed” by recent changes to the app’s terms of service allowing the company to collect such data. They demanded answers about whether the company is collecting such information from minors, whether it will be shared with third parties and how long it will be retained.
TikTok did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the letter.
Sen. Marco Rubio, meanwhile, urged the Biden administration Tuesday to ban TikTok in the US after the Chinese government took a board seat and partial ownership in a key subsidiary of ByteDance, the company behind the wildly popular video sharing app.
Rubio’s request came after news emerged this week that a Chinese government entity now controls a 1 percent stake and a board seat in Beijing ByteDance Technology, an entity that oversees Douyin — the Chinese version of TikTok — as well as a news aggregator with hundreds of millions of users.
Beijing Bytedance is separate from ByteDance proper, the Cayman Islands-based entity which controls TikTok, a company spokesperson told The Post on Tuesday.
But Rubio (R-Fla.) ignored the company’s explanation in a scathing statement late Tuesday in which he called on President Biden to revive a Trump-era effort to ban TikTok from the US.
“The Biden administration can no longer pretend that TikTok is not beholden to the Chinese Communist Party,” Rubio said. “Beijing’s aggressiveness makes clear that the regime sees TikTok as an extension of the party-state, and the US needs to treat it that way.”
Rubio added that the US should “establish a framework of standards that must be met before a high-risk, foreign-based app is allowed to operate on American telecommunications networks and devices.”
He also pointed to India, which banned TikTok last year amid border clashes with China, as an example that the US should follow.
Earlier this year, Biden ordered the Commerce Department to conduct a review of security concerns posed by TikTok and other apps even as he withdrew a set of Trump-era executive orders seeking to ban TikTok that had been blocked by courts.
Rubio’s office and the White House did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
“TikTok is led by an executive team in the US and Singapore,” a TikTok spokesperson said Wednesday. “The China-based subsidiary of ByteDance Ltd. referenced has no ownership of TikTok.”
China’s pugnacious foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian slammed Rubio during a Wednesday press conference.
“The US politician you mentioned has been making anti-China remarks tirelessly for his own interests in disregard of facts, and is doomed to end up in the dustbin of history,” said Lijian.