France will ban the use of Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok on the work telephones of civil servants, Civil Service Minister Stanislas Guerini stated on his Twitter account.
“In order to guarantee the cybersecurity of our administrations and civil servants, the government has decided to ban recreational applications such as TikTok on the professional phones of civil servants,” he stated in an announcement.
He added that for a number of weeks, a number of of France’s European and worldwide companions have adopted measures to limit or ban the downloading and set up of the TikTok software by their administrations.
Guerini stated leisure functions do not need adequate ranges of cybersecurity and knowledge safety in order to be deployed on administrations’ gear, including that the ban is efficient instantly and that authorities companies will monitor compliance.
He stated that, exceptionally, exemptions might be given for skilled causes, corresponding to institutional communication of an administration.
A string of Western governments and establishments have banned TikTok in latest weeks, together with the UK parliament, the Dutch and Belgian administrations and the New Zealand parliament.
Late final month, the European Union’s two largest policy-making establishments — the Commission and the Council — banned TikTok from employees telephones for cybersecurity causes.
Concerns have mounted globally in regards to the potential for the Chinese authorities to entry customers’ location and call knowledge by ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese guardian firm.
Meanwhile, US lawmakers at a congressional listening to on Thursday accused TikTok of serving dangerous content material and inflicting “emotional distress” on younger customers, grilling the Chinese-owned app’s CEO on the corporate’s outsized affect on teenagers.
Chew, in his first look earlier than Congress, testified that whereas the “vast majority” of TikTok customers are over the age of 18, the corporate has invested in measures to shield younger individuals who use the app.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
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