Senator Mark Warner of the Democratic Party has slammed China-owned video-sharing app TikTok, claiming that US President Donald Trump was “correct” to go after the company.
Warner made the remarks on Fox News Sunday, November 20, telling anchor Shannon Bream that the app is a big threat to Americans’ privacy. He also cautioned parents not to let their children install the program on their phones.
“Well, I believe Donald Trump was correct. I mean, TikTok is a huge threat “Warner informed Bream. “So, if you’re a parent with a child who uses tik tok, I’d be quite concerned. All of the information that your child enters and receives is stored somewhere in Beijing.”
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has called on regulators to ban the app in the United States, and FBI Director Christopher Wray has warned that it adds to China’s position as the world’s leading theft of U.S. data.
“China’s enormous hacking campaign is the world’s largest, and they have taken more personal and corporate data from Americans than any other country combined,” Wray told Congress last week.
Wray’s statement comes only weeks after Carr urged for the United States to outright ban TikTok, claiming that efforts to isolate the company’s U.S. operation from its headquarters in China were futile.
“[Dangers] include the possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations if they so chose, or to control software on millions of devices, which gives the opportunity to potentially tactically compromised personal devices,” he said.
“I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban,” he told Axios at the time, adding that there isn’t “a 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 the CCP.”