Canada bans TikTok on government devices due to security concerns - PingWest

Canada bans TikTok on government devices due to security concerns

Canada bans TikTok on government devices due to security concerns

16 hours ago

Canada has announced it is banning TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices, claiming that its risk to security and privacy is "unacceptable.

Canada also took action to prevent future downloads of TikTok by federal personnel, according to a statement from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. The statement also noted that TikTok's data harvesting techniques give users significant access to the phone's contents.

The modification was necessary, according to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, because of the level of security concerns around the app.

At a press conference on Monday near Toronto, he stated, "This may be the first step, this may be the only step we need to take."

"It's strange that the government of Canada has decided to prohibit TikTok on government-issued devices without stating any specific security concern or getting in touch with us with concerns only after similar bans were implemented in the EU and the US," a TikTok spokesman wrote in an email.

European Union’s executive branch announced last week that TikTok had been temporarily removed from employee phones as a security precaution.

The EU's move comes after a similar one in the US, where TikTok has been prohibited from official government devices by Congress and more than half of the states.

Late last year, US federal employees were forbidden from using TikTok, and on Monday, the White House instructed government organizations 30 days to remove the app from their systems.

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