If you are an employee of the US government and love creating and watching TikTok videos, we have bad news for you.
The House Administration Committee (COA) contacted staff saying that they can no longer install apps on House-managed mobile endpoints.
“The Cybersecurity Bureau has been identified as the TikTok mobile app posing a high risk to users due to a number of security risks,” the department noted in an email it sent to its staff.
Total ban
Anyone working in the lower chamber will have to remove the app from their devices immediately or risk being contacted by the COA Cybersecurity Office.
The ban will soon extend to other organizations within the US government as well. The recent $1.66 trillion aggregate spending bill, which is now being approved by President Biden, includes a more comprehensive ban, preventing all federally managed devices from installing the infamous app.
TikTok has recently gained immense popularity and is now considered the world’s largest social media platform. However, it is owned and operated by ByteDance, a Chinese software company, and given China’s policy on Privacydata management and human rights, soon caught the attention of the US government.
As a result, in 2020, former President Donald Trump issued an executive order declaring TikTok a “threat” and banning US companies from transacting with the app.
At the time, the Trump administration even tried to force the company to sell its US operations to a domestic buyer in an attempt to preserve locally generated data and protect it from possible exfiltration by the Chinese government.
While both the company and the Chinese government have denied any mishandling of the data, earlier this month ByteDance confirmed that its employees accessed user data belonging to journalists in an attempt to find out who leaked a particular set of information.
Moreover, last summer, the company confirmed that Chinese employees had access to US user data.
Through: Register (opens in a new tab)