European Commission prohibits TikTok

According to reports, employees of the EU’s executive body have until the middle of March to remove the app from their smartphones.

The popular social networking app TikTok, which is owned by China, has been ordered to be removed from company computers by the European Commission (EC), which justified the action as being required to improve cybersecurity.

The EC’s management board “agreed to suspend the TikTok application on business devices and personal devices enrolled in the Commission mobile device services,” according to a statement published by the authority on Thursday. This is done to safeguard the EC’s data and improve its cybersecurity.

According to an IT email issued to staff, employees have until the middle of March to comply or else they would lose access to their EC email and Skype for Business apps, as reported by EURACTIV.

The restriction is “misguided and based on fundamental misconceptions” about the social media network, a TikTok spokeswoman told EURACTIV. The company has “contacted the Commission to put the record straight and explain how we protect the data of the 125 million people throughout the EU who visit TikTok every month,” the spokesperson claimed.

The “Ban TikTok on United States Devices Act,” which attempts to outlaw the platform on all devices in the nation, was launched last month by a group of Republican politicians in the US. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), one of the bill’s writers, claimed that the app “opens the way for the Chinese Communist Party to acquire Americans’ personal information, keystrokes, and location through aggressive data harvesting” at the time.

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Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, directed state agencies to “remove all cybersecurity threats caused by TikTok” in December 2022 and forbade its usage on equipment provided by the government. At the time, reports claimed that the US House of Representatives’ legislators and employees had also been told to remove the programme from any devices used for business purposes.

The FBI’s Christopher Wray stated that the organisation had “national security concerns” about TikTok, including the “possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users, or control the recommendation algorithm,” during a hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee last year.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning responded to the claims at the time by accusing US authorities of “spreading falsehoods” in an effort to destroy a sizable Chinese company that competed with Western social media behemoths.

The main firm of TikTok, ByteDance, also denied any intention to follow Americans in the past.