Tik Tok: France joins the “prohibitionist” countries

After different countries issued a ban on the Tik Tok application citing “cybersecurity” reasons, France joined the list and ordered its public employees not to install it, along with other applications they consider risky. The United States, the United Kingdom, India, New Zealand and Belgium were the countries that preceded France in this new decision to ban Tik Tok on the professional phones of its employees. In that sense, from the delegation of the Minister of Public Function, Stanislas Guerini, they assured that it presents “risks in terms of cybersecurity and data protection of public officials and the administration.” In this way, in case public officials do not comply with the measure, they will receive sanctions at the “managerial” level of each ministry. Although during the pandemic – and after it – the application was one of the most downloaded in the world, the beginning of 2023 brought with it a new look towards Tik Tok. The app’s parent company, ByteDances, attracted Western attention for allegedly handing over personal data to China’s intelligence service. Based on these accusations, many countries decided to implement a “prohibitionist” policy against enforcement. In the United States, the government gave public officials a maximum of 30 days to delete the app from their official phones. Both the European Commission and the European Council and the European Parliament followed this line shortly after, while Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo maintained that “TikTok is a Chinese company, which is obliged to cooperate with Chinese intelligence services.” In France the situation is not new, since quite some time ago the government took aim against the now banned applications and also against Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram and Signal for presenting a risk to information security. For his part, the CEO of the application, Shou Zi Chew, acknowledged before the United States Congress that the company analyzed different videos to identify the main theme of them and the age of the users who uploaded them. In that line, Zi Chew remarked that “it is a real challenge for our industry because privacy versus the guarantee of age is a really big problem.”

Original source in Spanish