France will ban the usage of Chinese language-owned video-sharing app TikTok on the work telephones of civil servants, Civil Service Minister Stanislas Guerini mentioned on his Twitter account.
“With a view to assure the cybersecurity of our administrations and civil servants, the federal government has determined to ban leisure functions resembling TikTok on the skilled telephones of civil servants,” he mentioned 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 mentioned leisure functions don’t have ample ranges of cybersecurity and knowledge safety with a view to be deployed on administrations’ gear, including that the ban is efficient instantly and that authorities companies will monitor compliance.
He mentioned that, exceptionally, exemptions will be given for skilled causes, resembling 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 Fee and the Council — banned TikTok from employees telephones for cybersecurity causes.
Issues have mounted globally in regards to the potential for the Chinese language authorities to entry customers’ location and get in touch with knowledge by means of ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese language mother or father firm.
In the meantime, US lawmakers at a congressional listening to on Thursday accused TikTok of serving dangerous content material and inflicting “emotional misery” on younger customers, grilling the Chinese language-owned app’s CEO on the corporate’s outsized affect on teenagers.
Chew, in his first look earlier than Congress, testified that whereas the “overwhelming majority” of TikTok customers are over the age of 18, the corporate has invested in measures to guard younger individuals who use the app.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
