Democratic party senator, Mark Warner, has criticized China-owned videosharing app, TikTok, saying former US President Donald Trump “was right” to go after the company.
Warner made the comments during an appearance on Fox News Sunday, November 20, telling host Shannon Bream that the app represents a major threat to Americans’ privacy. He also warned parents against allowing their children to download the app on their phones.
“Well, I think Donald Trump was right. I mean, TikTok is an enormous threat,” Warner told Bream. “So if you’re a parent, and you’ve got a kid on tik tok, I would be very, very concerned. All of that data that your child is inputting and receiving is being stored somewhere in Beijing.”
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr called on regulators to ban the app in the U.S., and FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that it contributes to China’s status at the number one theft of U.S. data in the world.
“China’s vast hacking program is the world’s largest, and they have stolen more Americans’ personal and business data than every other nation combined,” Wray told lawmakers last week.
Wray’s statement came just weeks after Carr called for the U.S. to outright ban TikTok, arguing efforts to separate its U.S.-based branch from its headquarters in China were pointless.
He said; “[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.”
“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.”
