Skip to main content

Canada bans TikTok on government devices

TikTok has been banned from government-issued mobile devices in Canada, the country’s Treasury Board announced Monday. Taking effect on February 28, this block follows similar actions taken by the European Commission and some state governments in the U.S.

The European Commission issued their directive to remove TikTok from government devices late last week. That same day, four Canadian privacy regulators announced that they would jointly investigate TikTok. Already, the Chief Information Officer of Canada has determined that TikTok poses “an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security.” Canadian officials haven’t found any evidence that government data has been compromised, so this is considered a precautionary measure.

“The decision to remove and block TikTok from government mobile devices is being taken as a precaution, particularly given concerns about the legal regime that governs the information collected from mobile devices, and is in line with the approach of our international partners,” said Treasury Board President Mona Fortier in a statement. “On a mobile device, TikTok’s data collection methods provide considerable access to the contents of the phone.”

TikTok claims that the Canadian government did not reach out to discuss concerns about the app.

“It’s curious that the Government of Canada has 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,” a TikTok spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch. “We are always available to meet with our government officials to discuss how we protect the privacy and security of Canadians, but singling out TikTok in this way does nothing to achieve that shared goal.”

In December, the U.S. House of Representatives banned the use of TikTok on any government devices. Some members of Congress still have TikTok accounts, presumably managed on separate devices. State governments like those in Texas, Georgia, Maryland, South Carolina and more than a dozen others have enacted similar restrictions. In some cases, these bans trickle down to state-funded college campuses, where schools like the University of Texas, Auburn University and the University of Oklahoma have prohibited the use of TikTok on campus wi-fi or school-owned devices.

These government bodies are concerned that TikTok, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, could be used by the Chinese government to gather sensitive information from political officials. Though TikTok repeatedly assured American consumers that their data was stored in the U.S., an investigation last year revealed that engineers in China had access to American TikTok data as recently as January 2022. TikTok then said it would move U.S. users’ data to Oracle servers stored in the United States. Another investigation, corroborated by ByteDance, found that a small group of engineers inappropriately accessed two U.S. journalists’ data; they planned to use these journalists’ location data to determine if they crossed paths with any ByteDance employees who may have leaked information to these reporters.

US House bans TikTok on lawmakers’ official phones

European Commission orders staff to remove TikTok from work devices

Canada bans TikTok on government devices by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch



from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/Z4FCaGX
via https://ift.tt/3MYF04g
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When the clocks change for Daylight Saving Time, and why we do it at all

The clocks on our smartphones do something bizarre twice a year: One day in the spring, they jump ahead an hour, and our alarms go off an hour sooner. We wake up bleary-eyed and confused until we remember what just happened. Afterward, "Daylight Saving Time" becomes the norm for about eight months (And yes, it's called "Daylight Saving" not "Daylight Savings." I don't make the rules). Then, in the fall, the opposite happens. Our clocks set themselves back an hour, and we wake up refreshed, if a little uneasy.  Mild chaos ensues at both annual clock changes. What feels like an abrupt and drastic lengthening or shortening of the day causes time itself to seem fictional. Babies and dogs demand that their old sleep and feeding habits remain unchanged. And more consequential effects — for better or worse — may be involved as well (more on which in a minute). Changing our clocks is an all-out attack on our perception of time as an immutable law of ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A speeding black hole is birthing baby stars across light years

Astronomers think they have discovered a supermassive black hole traveling away from its home galaxy at 4 million mph — so fast it's not doing what it's notorious for: sucking light out of the universe. Quite the opposite, possibly. Rather than ripping stars to shreds and swallowing up every morsel, this black hole is believed to be fostering new star formation, leaving a trail of newborn stars stretching 200,000 light-years through space . Pieter van Dokkum, an astronomy professor at Yale University, said as the black hole rams into gas, it seems to trigger a narrow corridor of new stars, where the gas has a chance to cool. How exactly it works, though, isn't known, said van Dokkum, who led research on the phenomenon captured by NASA 's Hubble Space Telescope accidentally. A paper on the findings was published last week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters . “What we’re seeing is the aftermath," he said in a statement . "Like the wake behind a ship, we’r...
Post a Comment
Read more