After several countries issued a ban on the Tik Tok application using “cybersecurity” reasons, France joined the list and ordered its public employees not to install it, along with other applications they consider dangerous.
The United States of America, the United Kingdom, India, New Zealand and Belgium were the countries that preceded France in this new decision to ban Tik Tok on the phones of their professional employees. In this sense, Stanislas Guerini, from the office of the Minister of Public Administration, stated that they present “dangers in terms of cyber security and public data protection for the police and management”.
In this way, in the event that the public officials did not comply with the measures, they will receive sanctions at the level of each ministry “minister”.
Despite the fact that during the pandemic and after it the application was one of the most downloaded in the world, the beginning of the year 2013 brought with it a new aspect of Tik Tok. The app’s parent company, ByteDances, has drawn the attention of the West over its alleged sharing of personal data with the Chinese intelligence service.
As a result of these charges, many countries have decided to implement a “prohibition” policy against the applications. In the United States, the government has given public officials a maximum period of 30 days to delete the application from public telephones.
Both the European Commission and the European Council and the European Parliament followed this line shortly after, with Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo stating that “TikTok is a Chinese company that is bound to cooperate with the Chinese intelligence services.”
In France, the situation is not new, since some time ago the government targeted applications that are now banned, and also against Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram and Sign for presenting a risk to the security of information.
On the part of the CEO of the application, Shou Zi Chew before the Congress of the United States recognized that the company has different videos to identify the main purpose and age of the users who uploaded them. Among those lines, Zi Chew that “it is a real challenge for our industry, because privacy versus trust is a really big issue.”
