Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) says that TikTok should have no role in the upcoming first-ever U.S. Cyber Games.

Also Read: Biden Rescinds Trump's TikTok WeChat Ban

The games are a private industry-led effort to promote careers in cybersecurity, but receive funding from the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

That could be tough since the social media giant is a founding sponsor of the games and is on the advisory board alongside representatives of U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.

For Wicker, ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, that‘s the big problem and he made that clear in a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

“Allowing TikTok to play any role in the first U.S. Cyber Games, including joining its board alongside U.S. federal officials, is unacceptable,” Wicker wrote. “TikTok should be given no opportunity to interfere in any of the nation’s cyber initiatives, let alone those carried out with financial support from American taxpayers.”

Wicker pointed out that last April the Chinese Communist Party took an ownership stake in a subsidiary of ByteDance, the parent of TikTok.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published a guide to privacy best practices, "Privacy Framework: A Tool for Improving Privacy through Enterprise Risk Management." 

The idea is to continue to get the benefits of data collection while mitigating the privacy risks while avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach, an approach which deregulatory types often associate with "heavy handed" government regulation.  

Related: Commerce Releases Suspect Tech-Vetting Framework 

The self-regulatory framework has no force of law and is not binding on anyone. Instead, it is meant to be a tool for privacy-by-design practices that put privacy risks on the same level as other risks and is meant to work in concert with the "Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure." 

Related: Ad Groups Form Privacy Coalition 

It is billed as supporting:  

• "Building customers’ trust by supporting ethical decision-making in product and service design or 

deployment that optimizes beneficial uses of data while minimizing adverse consequences for individuals’ privacy and society as a whole;1 

• "Fulfilling current compliance obligations, as well as future-proofing products and services to meet these obligations in a changing technological and policy environment; and 

• "Facilitating communication about privacy practices with individuals, business partners, assessors, and regulators." 

NIST says the framework was the handiwork of public and private stakeholders and the product of three workshops, requests for into and comment, five webinars and hundreds of stakeholder meetings.