Apple, Google receive letter from FCC Commissioner to remove TikTok from app stores
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Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) have received letters from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to remove TikTok from their respective app stores, noting "its pattern of surreptitious data practices."
In a series of tweets, Carr noted that the Chinese staff of TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance (BDNCE), had access to U.S. user data up through January, citing recent media reports.
Last week, BuzzFeed reported that U.S. user data had been "repeatedly" accessed in China, citing leaked audio from 80 internal meetings at TikTok.
"Tiktokâs pattern of misrepresentations coupled with its ownership by an entity beholden to the [Chinese Communist Party] has resulted in U.S. military branches and national security agencies banning it from government devices," Carr wrote in the letter, addressed to Apple (AAPL) Chief Executive Tim Cook and Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) Chief Executive Sundar Pichai.
"Numerous provisions of Appleâs & Googleâs policies are relevant to TikTok's pattern of surreptitious data harvestingâa pattern that runs contrary to its public representations," Carr added.
"And thereâs plenty of precedent for holding TikTok accountable by booting it from these app stores."
Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) and TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha. 
Following last week's BuzzFeed report, TikTok said that it had completed the process of routing all of its U.S. traffic through Oracle's (ORCL) cloud technology infrastructure.
Albert Calamug, TikTok's head of U.S. security public policy, said at the time that the video-sharing company is still using data centers in the U.S. and Singapore for backup services. However, Calamug said TikTok expects to soon delete the private data of U.S. users from its own data centers and "fully pivot" toward using Oracle's (ORCL) cloud servers in the U.S.
On Wednesday, Wedbush Securities said that demand for the Apple (AAPL) iPhone is "holding up slightly better than expected," despite fears to the contrary.