Australia on Tuesday banned the use of the Chinese social network Tik Tok on mobile phones and government devices. The Australian government alludes to cybersecurity reasons to veto the social network. Likewise, Attorney General Mark Dreyfus has declared his fear of possible “foreign interference.”
The decision has been made by the attorney general after “receiving advice from intelligence and security agencies,” according to a statement. Previously, the director of the country’s intelligence service, Mike Burgess, had declared before a Senate committee that social networks are used to “disseminate information.”
Dreyfus added that the ban will take effect “as soon as possible”, and clarified that in his office he will only allow exceptions in the installation of this application “on a case-by-case basis and with adequate security measures” to avoid any risk of data theft.
Australia follows in the footsteps of many other countries that have imposed restrictions on the use of the application for their employees, fearing that the Chinese authorities may violate the right to privacy through the data collected in this application, have decided to remove it from official cell phones.
The ban on the application has been increasing in recent months. The United States was the first to close the door on the Chinese company. In December 2022, the US Senate banned federal government employees from using the app on official devices after an investigation into security risks posed by the app.
The European institutions were next, on February 23 the European Commission and the Council of the EU prohibited their employees from installing or using the application on official devices to further strengthen cybersecurity measures. Canada followed the instructions of its neighboring country on February 27 on the phones that the government provides to its staff.
During the month of March, the rule was also imposed in Denmark, Latvia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France.
All the countries that have vetoed the application agree on the reasons for which they have made that decision. All of them associate TikTok with possible cybersecurity problems. But why are they so afraid of a social network?
TikTok is an application that was launched in September 2016 by the Chinese company ByteDance. It allows you to make short videos with mobile devices with millions of views and has become one of the networks preferred by young people around the world, either as a distraction or as a means of obtaining news information.
But all the success it is having has been accompanied by the fear that the ByteDance company could share the data of the users of the social network with the Chinese government. Although this is something that contradicts safety regulations, especially in Europe.
Such is the distrust of Western countries with the application that the executive director of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, appeared on March 23 in the US Congress to clear up the doubts that Americans had about the application. The director had to answer before an Energy and Commerce committee to talk about the platform’s policies, data privacy, its impact on minors and the company’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
