Security News > 2023 > February > European Commission bans TikTok from staff gadgets

The European Commission on Thursday banned the use of the TikTok short video app on corporate devices and on the personal devices of employees enrolled in the commission's mobile device management service.

The commission's statement cites the need to protect staff from a rising number of cyber threats but fails to explain while TikTok was singled out.

Despite this ostensibly distributed corporate footprint, the assumption among Western governments is Beijing could demand access to the data TikTok collects outside the Middle Kingdom or could demand the alteration of TikTok source code to facilitate intelligence gathering.

US House boots TikTok from government phones Meta, Google, TikTok and friends sue California to block kids privacy law TikTok could be banned from America, thanks to proposed bipartisan bill Gen Z lingo and search engines: A Millennial Odyssey.

In a Senate hearing last September, TikTok chief operating officer Vanessa Pappas was asked by Senator Rob Portman whether she "Will commit to cutting off all data and metadata flows to China, Chinese-based TikTok employees, ByteDance employees, or any other party located in China?".

TikTik did not respond to a request for comment about the European Commission ban, though on Wednesday the company published a rebuttal to a report from US-Australian cybersecurity firm Internet 2.0 that rated TikTok as the worst app in terms of data collection among 23 chat and social media apps tested.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/02/24/european_commission_bans_on_tiktok/