1 of 1 New Zealand bans the TikTok app on MPs’ devices — Photo: AP Michael Dwyer New Zealand bans the TikTok app on MPs’ devices — Photo: AP Michael Dwyer
The popular TikTok app is banned from being used on the mobile phones of UK government officials and New Zealand MPs. The restriction announced on Thursday (16th) is a preventive national security measure that has also been taken in other institutions.
In recent weeks, the United States, the European Union, Canada and Belgium have announced the imposition of restrictions on the use of TikTok in some of their public institutions due to the risk that information from users of the application will be shared with the Chinese government.
China denies access to Tiktok’s confidential information and accuses the US government of “unjustified attacks” on the Chinese company. However, every day more countries are putting limits on the application, which has more than 1 billion users worldwide.
How do governments explain the restriction on TikTok?
When the European Commission asked all of its more than 30,000 employees to uninstall the app in February, it emphasized that the decision was motivated by cybersecurity risks.
“Since the beginning of its mandate, the European Commission has emphasized cybersecurity, the protection of its staff and everyone who works for the institution,” said thenEconomy Commissioner Thierry Breton.
Breton did not provide any information on what risks the Commission saw in the application. However, the entire discussion relates to the collected user data of the app, which belongs to the Chinese technology group ByteDance.
From the use of the social network, Tiktok collects a range of information about each user, their preferences, their contacts and their areas of interest. There are suspicions that this information could be shared with the Chinese government.
When collecting information, the application should ensure data security to protect the privacy of each user, a human right, reminds the secretarygeneral of the National Council of Digital in France, Jean Cattan.
But for government officials or politicians, sharing information with another government, such as a user’s location or topics of interest and conversation, could jeopardize national security, Cattan says.
And that is the point that concerns several countries, as Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo has made clear.
When Belgium decided in early March to ban the app among its employees, De Croo said he couldn’t be “innocent” and that TikTok was “obliged to cooperate with Chinese intelligence agencies.”
Are there known cases of espionage?
The US is investigating espionage charges against Bytedance, the company that owns the Chinese application. In November 2022, according to the American newspaper New York Times, two employees of the company admitted to having accessed information of American users, including two journalists, without their consent.
The employees had access to information such as the IP addresses of these people, their contacts and other data. The company subsequently fired these employees.
Bytedance claims to make changes to improve data security and denies that information is shared with the Chinese government.
Despite the ban on discussing the application in the US, according to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs there is no evidence of the allegations made.
“The United States has yet to provide evidence that TikTok threatens the national security of the United States,” Chinese spokesman Wang Wenbin said.
Is TikTok riskier than Facebook or Twitter?
According to experts, the lack of transparency in the use of information that was criticized in the Chinese application is also being repeated in the networks of American companies.
“Right now we have to decide who is the ‘policeman’ who watches over our citizens: the Chinese or the Americans. When people use Facebook, American authorities can have access to user data. If they use TikTok, they are the Chinese authorities who can have access,” assesses Etienne Drouard, a lawyer specializing in information technology.