- Public Citizen on Thursday urged lawmakers and the FTC to investigate TikTok and ByteDance.Public Citizen in a letter on Thursday urged lawmakers and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the TikTok app and its parent company, ByteDance, joining a growing number of bipartisan calls to investigate reports that the Beijing-based company planned to use the video-based social media app to surveil specific Americans.After reviewing internal materials, Forbes reported last week that ByteDance's Internal Audit team was planning to use location information gathered from US users of the TikTok app for surveillance of two American citizens who were not employees of the app.Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, and Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, called for a separate FTC investigation after BuzzFeed News reported that sensitive data from US users was repeatedly accessed by ByteDance staff in China, despite the company's assurances that US user data was stored in the states and was inaccessible abroad."In light of this new report, we ask that your agency immediately initiate a Section 5 investigation on the basis of apparent deception by TikTok, and coordinate this work with any national security or counter-intelligence investigation that may be initiated by the U.S. Department of Justice.""