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Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, penned a letter to Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, and Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, asking them to ban Chinese-owned TikTok from their app stores due to national security grounds, as reported by The New York Times.
Bennet noted that no company subject to "Chinese Communist Party dictates" should have the power to accumulate extensive data on the American people or curate content for nearly a third of our population. He further referenced a BuzzFeed News report from June last year, which suggested that TikTok engineers in China had access to the data of U.S. users for five months.
The Senator concluded his letter by requesting that the two tech giants "remove TikTok from [their] respective app stores immediately." TikTok has been in the crosshairs of U.S. regulators for some time now, with at least 27 state governments passing full or partial bans on the app and a bipartisan bill introduced in Congress in December that would bar the app from the entire United States. The House Foreign Affairs Committee is slated to vote on the bill this month.
The full letter from Senator Bennet to Apple and Google can be found on Scribd. Due to the political or social nature of the discussion, the discussion thread is located in the Political News forum and is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.