Why has TikTok become unwanted on the phones of US and Canadian officials?

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This decision stems from a law passed at the end of December, which prohibits the use of TikTok in the administrations. The Pentagon and the State Department are already applying it, but today the White House is therefore asking all government agencies to comply.

>> The Ministry of the Armed Forces plans to “disadvise the use of the application” TikTok to French soldiers

In other words, to remove the application if it is already installed on the employees’ professional laptops and, if it is not, to prohibit its installation. Decision that only follows a general trend: more than half of American states have already banned TikTok to their officials at the local level.

This American ban is far from being an isolated case. Last week, the European Commission banned TikTok from its 33,000 employees. Applicable no later than Wednesday, March 15, for professional telephones, but also for personal telephones where applications used for work, such as e-mail or video calls, would already be installed. The Council of the European Union, which has a staff of around 3,100, followed suit.

“We are disappointed with this decision, which we believe to be misguided and based on fundamental misconceptions“said a TikTok spokesperson.”We are surprised that the Commission has not contacted us directly, nor offered an explanation. We reached out to her to set the record straight and explain how we protect the data of the 125 million people across the EU who come to TikTok every month.” The group is planning to open a “european transparency and accountability center“.

In Canada, an emergency measure

In Ottawa, the government urgently announced the same measure on Monday, February 27, on behalf of a “unacceptable level of risk” for privacy and security. Relations between China and Canada have deteriorated sharply in recent years, particularly after Canada’s arrest (at the request of the United States) of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou in 2018.

The Canadian Privacy Commissioner has announced that it has launched an investigation to establish whether TikTok complies with Canadian laws, in particular by verifying that the app has obtained “valid consent for the collection, use and disclosure of personal information”.

The subject has even interested Indian Twittos (in India, too, TikTok has been banned): this Internet user explains that “IAmerica and European countries have admitted that there is a strong possibility of privacy violation and espionage. TikTok is a national security threat“.

In the Netherlands since January, the government is strongly encouraged to no longer use the app to communicate. But most other countries in the European Union have so far avoided banning the use of TikTok.

TikTok, spy tool?

If, as we know, TikTok is a platform where you can endlessly scroll through very short, not always interesting videos, the real problem is that it belongs to ByteDance. And like all Chinese tech giants, ByteDance is under the control of the authorities.

In a context of growing tensions with Beijing, Americans (and more broadly, Westerners) fear that TikTok will turn into a spy tool, because the application sees everything in your phone: microphone, geolocation, photos, documents.

At the end of 2022, TikTok also acknowledged that its employees could consult user data, and even confirmed that this had been the case for two American journalists who had written about the company, following a survey published in December by Forbes magazine (in English). But the group assures that the Chinese government does not have access to this information.

Towards a total ban?

Let’s talk numbers: TikTok is 1 billion active users worldwide (in sixth place among the most used social platforms, according to the latest report by We Are Social, on the evolution of digital, published in January), including 100 million in the United States. Suffice to say that civil servants represent only a very small proportion of users.

This is why, for a long time, even before the Chinese spy balloon affair – last month – some American elected officials have been calling for an outright ban on TikTok, including for the general public. What Donald Trump was already demanding in 2020.

Aware that the tide is turning. The app’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, has already made the trip to Brussels. Thursday, March 23, he passes his great oral before the Congress, where he will have to give sacred guarantees of security. Otherwise, TikTok will probably have to separate from its Chinese owner if it wants to continue to develop in the United States.


source site-25