Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) has called on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their respective app stores, arguing that no company subject to “dictates” by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) should be allowed such broad access to American audiences or harvest their data.
Bennet made the appeal in a Feb. 1 letter to Google parent Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
“TikTok poses a unique concern because Chinese law obligates ByteDance, its Beijing-based parent company, to ‘support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work,’” Bennet wrote.
“Beijing’s requirement raises the obvious risk that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could weaponize TikTok against the United States, specifically, by forcing ByteDance to surrender Americans’ sensitive data or manipulate the content Americans receive to advance China’s interests,” he continued….