FCC Commissioner on TikTok as a national security risk

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr discusses the national security threat posed by the popular social media app TikTok, and details how the Chinese government uses and collects app data. Carr joined Yahoo Finance Live on June 30, 2022.

Video transcript

BRENDAN CARR: For years now, I guess, TikTok in the US has been saying, don't worry. We store all US user data on servers here in the US. And what this BuzzFeed News report, really a blockbuster reporting, showed from leaked audio is that according to the reports, everything is seen in China. So the question of where to store the data is a bit of a sleight of hand because it's being accessed by engineers with ByteDance in Beijing. And they're ultimately beholden to the CCP.

And we know that they are in search of sucking up as much data as possible for whether it's business espionage or all sorts of potentially nefarious purposes. And what we see beneath the surface, that's just the sheep's clothing, is it's pulling biometric data, face recognition, voiceprint, search browsing history, keystroke patterns, location information. And we know is that the CCP, if it gets all of this data, has all sorts of ends that it can achieve. It looks at, again, business industrial espionage, blackmail activity. So there's a lot of reasons to be concerned.