Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Brendan Carr told Axios on Tuesday the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States should "ban" the Chinese-owned TikTok social media application in the U.S. due to concerns about users' data security.
"I don't believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban," Carr told the publication. "There simply 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 [Chinese Communist Party].'"
The foreign investment committee, known as CFIUS, is currently reviewing if TikTok's Chinese owned parent company ByteDance can divest the social media platform to an American company and continue to remain operational in the United States, the report said.
CFIUS was established by executive order in May 1975 during former President Gerald Ford's administration with the purpose of evaluating certain foreign transactions involving foreign investment that could impact national security concerns, according to the Department of the Treasury website.
It is made up of eight Cabinet officials including the secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, secretary of defense, secretary of commerce, the U.S. trade representative, attorney general, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, according to the executive order establishing the panel.
The agency and TikTok came very close to making a deal in September, The New York Times reported, in which the social media company would make changes to its data security without selling the company.
While not yet formalized, TikTok spokesman Brooke Oberwetter said Tuesday the company "is engaging" with lawmakers to address their concerns and has been routing American user's data on the app through servers controlled by Oracle.
Despite TikTok's efforts, Carr sent a letter to both Apple and Google asking for the app to be removed from their respective application stores.
"TikTok has long claimed that its U.S. user data has been stored on servers in the U.S., and yet those representations provided no protection against the data being accessed from Beijing," the Times reported Carr writing. "Indeed, TikTok's statement that '100% of U.S. user traffic is being routed to Oracle' says nothing about where that data can be accessed from."
TikTok told Axios that Carr has "no role" in the eventual CFIUS decision.
"Commissioner Carr has no role in the confidential discussions with the U.S. government related to TikTok and appears to be expressing views independent of his role as an FCC commissioner," a company spokesperson told Axios. "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."
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