In an interview with Axios on Tuesday, one of the five Federal Communications Communication’s (FCC) commissioners, Brendan Carr, said that the U.S. should ban TikTok, the widely popular short-form video app with approximately 1 billion users worldwide.
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Although the FCC can’t take such an action, Carr suggested that the Council on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS), a different governmental body that can regulate foreign investment, should ban the app.
“I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban,” he told the outlet.
Carr was referring to the risk of TikTok sending U.S. user data back to China, which has come up, as the outlet noted, in recent news reports, which have claimed TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, planned to monitor some U.S. citizen’s locations and accessed other user data.
There is no “world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it’s not finding its way back into the hands” of China’s Communist Party, he told Axios.
As the outlet noted, TikTok is presently in discussions with the CFIUS, mainly on whether or how it could separate from ByteDance and become a U.S. company to continue serving users.
TikTok told Entrepreneur via email: “Commissioner Carr has no role in the confidential discussions with the US government related to TikTok and appears to be expressing views independent of his role as an FCC commissioner. We are confident that we are on a path to reaching an agreement with the U.S. Government that will satisfy all reasonable national security concerns.”
Politicians from across the aisle have raised issues about security on TikTok, and in 2016, then President Donald Trump also considered banning the app.
