TIKTOK TO BE BANNED FROM GOVERNMENT PHONES IN AUSTRIA

Wed 10 May 2023:

Austria’s Interior Minister Gerhard Karner announced on Wednesday that Austria will join the increasing list of nations that have banned the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok from government employees’ work phones, Reuters reported.

TikTok has already been blocked in a number of Western countries, including the United States, Britain, and numerous other European Union members. The app was prohibited in March by the two largest policy-making bodies in the EU.

The White House told federal agencies on Feb. 27 that they had 30 days to delete the app from government devices. A growing number of other countries and government bodies — including Britain and its Parliament, Canada, the executive arm of the European Union, France and New Zealand’s Parliament — have also recently banned the app from official devices. On April 4, Australia became the latest country to announce that it was prohibiting the TikTok app on government devices on advice from intelligence and security agencies.

“It will be banned from work mobile phones. On private phones outside the state network it will of course be possible (to use the app),” Karner told reporters before a weekly cabinet meeting when asked if politicians in government would be able to keep using the app.

TikTok, which is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, is under scrutiny from governments and regulators because of concerns that China’s government could use the app to harvest users’ data or advance its interests.

Lawmakers and regulators in the West have increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, may put sensitive user data, like location information, into the hands of the Chinese government. They have pointed to laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-gathering operations. They are also worried that China could use TikTok’s content recommendations for misinformation.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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