TikTok to Get Banned in France for Use on Smartphones of Civil Servants

France will ban the usage 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 utility by their administrations.

Guerini stated leisure purposes wouldn’t have enough ranges of cybersecurity and information safety so as to be deployed on administrations’ tools, including that the ban is efficient instantly and that authorities companies will monitor compliance.

He stated that, exceptionally, exemptions could be given for skilled causes, resembling institutional communication of an administration.

A string of Western governments and establishments have banned TikTok in current weeks, together with the UK parliament, the Dutch and Belgian administrations and the New Zealand parliament.

Late final month, the European Union’s two greatest policy-making establishments — the Commission and the Council — banned TikTok from workers telephones for cybersecurity causes.

Concerns have mounted globally in regards to the potential for the Chinese authorities to entry customers’ location and make contact with information via ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese mum or dad 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 guard younger individuals who use the app.

© Thomson Reuters 2023