Canada announced on Monday, local time, that it has banned the video-sharing app TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices. It is said that the app will be taken off of government-issued phones in Canada on Tuesday. This shows how worried Western officials are about the app, which Chinese companies own.
The Associated Press said that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this could be the first step in a bigger plan. Trudeau said, “I think that many Canadians, both businesses and individuals, will think about the security of their data now that the government has taken the big step of telling all federal employees they can’t use TikTok on their work phones. They may make a choice.”
As a security measure, the EU’s executive branch said last week that employees couldn’t use TikTok on their phones for a short time. This is similar to what has happened in the US, where more than half of the states and Congress have banned TikTok from official government devices.
Last week, Canada’s federal privacy regulator and the privacy watchdogs of British Columbia, Alberta, and Quebec said they would investigate whether the app follows Canadian privacy laws.
TikTok is popular among young people, but the fact that China owns it has made people worried that Beijing could use it to spy on users in the West or spread pro-China propaganda and false information. ByteTok, a Chinese company whose headquarters will move to Singapore in 2020, owns TikTok.
Europe and the US are paying more attention to TikTok’s security and data privacy because they are worried that the app could be used to spread pro-Beijing views or delete user information.
China and the West are currently in a technological tug-of-war over spy balloons and computer chips, among other things.
Fordell, the head of Canada’s Treasury Board, said that the federal government would also stop the app from being downloaded on official devices.
In a statement, Futrell said that Canada’s chief information officer found it “poses an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security.”
“The way TikTok collects information on mobile devices gives a lot of access to the contents of the calls in question,” she said. “It’s clear that there are risks to using this app, but we don’t know yet if government information has been compromised.”
Recent news stories have also raised concerns about possible Chinese meddling in the upcoming Canadian election. This has led opposition parties to call for a public investigation into alleged foreign meddling in the election.
A representative for TikTok said in an email, “It is strange that the Canadian government has moved to block TikTok on government-issued devices without citing any specific security concerns or contacting us with questions, just after similar bans were put in place in the EU and the US.”
In the statement, the company said they are always available to discuss Canadians’ privacy and security concerns. “Singling out TikTok in this way does not help us reach that common goal,” the email said. It stops government officials from reaching the public on a platform millions of Canadians love.
