Democratic senator urges Apple, Google to kick TikTok out of app stores

WASHINGTON: TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, should be removed from app stores run by Apple Inc and Alphabet’s Google because the short video social media app poses a risk to national security, Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat on the intelligence committee, said in a letter dated Thursday.

The app, which Congress has already banned from federal government devices, has come under increasing criticism because of concern that China’s government could use it to harvest data on Americans or advance Chinese interests.