Canada has joined the US and the EU in enacting a sweeping ban preventing TikTok from being installed on all government-issued mobile devices as Western officials crack down on the Chinese-owned video-sharing app.
Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, did not rule out further action. “I suspect that as the government takes the significant step of telling all federal employees that they can no longer use TikTok on their work phones, many Canadians, from businesses to individuals, will reflect on the security of their own data and perhaps make decisions,” he said. saying.
“I’m always a fan of giving Canadians the information so they can make the decisions that are right for them.”
The EU executive branch said last week that it had temporarily banned TikTok on phones used by employees as a cybersecurity measure. On Tuesday, the European Parliament followed suit, banning staff from installing the app on any phone that had access to email or parliamentary networks.
In the US, more than half of the states and Congress have banned TikTok on official government devices. On Monday, the White House expanded the ban to include all government agencies, giving federal employees 30 days to remove the app from their work devices.
TikTok is hugely popular with young people, but its Chinese ownership has raised fears that Beijing could be collecting data on Western users or pushing pro-China narratives and misinformation. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company that moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020.
TikTok is facing increasing scrutiny from Europe and the US over data security and privacy amid concerns the app could be used to promote pro-Beijing views or sweep information of the users. It comes as China and the West are locked in a broader tug-of-war over technology, from spy balloons to computer chips.
The company has faced a few bruising scandals over the years. It admitted in December that it had used its app to spy on several American journalists as part of a leak investigation and fired at least four employees as a result. Furthermore, it has repeatedly been shown to be less detached from its Chinese ownership than it claimed, with moderation guidelines (since revised) driving Beijing’s foreign policy and lingering links between TikTok’s codebase and its sister app TikTok. Mainland China, Douyin.
But despite investigations on different continents, no conclusive evidence has been found to show that TikTok’s data collection is anything more than the same “surveillance capitalism” that rivals like Facebook and Instagram apply to sell targeted ads. Instead, TikTok has been asked to defend itself against charges of what it might do if forced by the Chinese state.
The president of the Canadian treasury board, Mona Fortier, said that the federal government would also block the download of the app on official devices in the future. Fortier said Canada’s chief information officer had determined that it presented “an unacceptable level of privacy and security risk… On a mobile device, TikTok’s data collection methods provide substantial access to phone content,” it said. Fortier.
“While the risks of using this app are clear, at this time we have no evidence that government information was compromised.”
A TikTok spokesperson said in an email: “It is curious that the Canadian government has moved to block TikTok on government-issued devices without citing any specific security issues or contacting us with questions only after similar bans were introduced on the EU and the US ”
The company said it was always available to discuss the privacy and security of Canadians. “Singling out TikTok in this way does not help achieve that shared goal,” the spokesperson wrote. “All it does is prevent officials from reaching the public on a platform loved by millions of Canadians.”
