Canada: banned Chinese app TikTok for security purposes
New Delhi, March 1: The Canadian government banned Chinese video-sharing app TikTok from the government-issued device starting on Tuesday for security purposes.
The decision has been taken for better security reasons, as it has been feared that the TikTok app will share the user’s personal data, creating a question mark over the user’s privacy policy.
The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said about the banning of the TikTok app, “I suspect that the government has taken the significant step of telling all federal employees that they can no longer use TikTok on their work phones,” and he further added that “many Canadian businesses and private individuals will reflect on the security of their own data and perhaps make choices.”
It was only the first step. “There might be further action regarding this matter,” said the Canadian PM.
The president of Canada’s Treasury Board, Mona Fortier, said in the statement that the government “is committed to keeping government information secure.”
She revealed that the “TikTok app considerably has access to the contact on the phone,” she added further, “while the use of this app is clearly very risky and at this point, we do not know whether government information has been compromised or not.”
Previously, for the cyber security measure, the European Union executive branch temporarily banned TikTok from phones used by government employees. After the EU’s action, a similar action was taken in the US, where more than half of the states have banned TikTok from official government devices.
The owner of the app Bytedance responded to the banning incident by saying that the government should have discussed their concerns with the company rather than taking direct action. “It’s curious that the government of Canada moved to block TikTok on government-issued devices without citing any specific security concern or contacting us with questions only after similar bans were introduced in the EU and the US,” said the company.
TikTok, which is wildly popular among the younger generation, is criticised for sharing users’ private data or misusing the data. In the year 2020, India banned it from all over the country.
