TikTok Dapat Serangan Maut Dari Senator AS, Perminta Apple Dan Google Segera Penghapus App

TikTok has again received a deadly attack. (photo: dock. tiktok)

JAKARTA - TikTok has again received a deadly attack. This time, the Senator of the United States (US), Michael Bennet (D-CO) demanded that Apple and Google immediately remove the application from their online store.

In a letter addressed to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai yesterday, Bennett argued TikTok pose a special threat to US national security due to its data collection practices.

"Large influence of TikTok and aggressive data collection pose a special threat to US national security because of the obligations of its parent company under Chinese law," Bennet wrote in the letter.

"Given these serious and growing concerns, I ask you to immediately remove TikTok from your respective app stores," he added.

Bennet's move to limit the download of ByteDance's app is just the latest in a series of increased congressional measures to ban Chinese-owned apps.

Since January, Republicans and Democrats in the US have called on their colleagues or US President Joe Biden's administration officials to immediately impose stricter data collection restrictions or app bans nationally, citing possible risks to US national security.

Bennet, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was the first lawmaker to directly contact app store providers such as Apple and Google requesting the removal of TikTok.

Launching The Verge, Friday, February 1, for more than three years, TikTok has been caught up in negotiations with the federal government, especially the Foreign Investment Committee in the United States (CFIUS), to continue operating its US applications.

In the administration of former US President Donald Trump alone, TikTok often faces increasing scrutiny from lawmakers who fear the app can share US user data with the Chinese government.

Although he did not directly respond to this, in a rare public interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit last year, TikTok CEO Shou Zi▁hukum plans to make Project Texas.

The move was led to move all data from Virginia and Singapore to the US-based Oracle server, of course, to be monitored by a new subsidiary known as TikTok US Data Security Inc.

However, it is no longer a secret that ByteDance employees have repeatedly accessed US user data for the past few years, even though they are not in Uncle Sam's country.

Forbes reported in December last year that ByteDance employees inappropriately obtained data collected from US users. At least two reporters saw their data by employees investigating the leakage of internal company documents in the past.

ByteDance confirmed the report and said it had fired the four employees who participated in the scheme, two of whom worked in China.