U.S. federal agencies will have to clear their devices of the TikTok video app within 30 days, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) ordered on Monday. Owned by the Chinese company Byte Dance, TikTok had been targeted by American lawmakers who consider the application a threat to national security, and had banned its use on civil servants’ devices in a law passed in late December. The OMB’s order is taken pursuant to this law, ratified in early January by President Joe Biden.
In a memorandum, the director of this office, Shalanda Young, asks government agencies to “remove and prohibit installations” of the application on devices owned or managed by them, and to “prohibit Internet traffic”. from these devices to the application. The ban does not apply to non-federal US entities or the millions of individuals who use TikTok. But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) deplores the new law, saying it amounts to “effectively banning TikTok”.
“Congress must not censor entire platforms and deprive Americans of their constitutional right to free speech and expression,” said Jenna Leventoff, senior policy adviser at the ACLU, in a statement. “We have the right to use TikTok and other platforms to exchange our thoughts, ideas and opinions with people across the country and around the world,” she adds. The ultra-popular platform of short and viral videos is increasingly scrutinized by Westerners who fear that Beijing could thus access the data of users around the world. The ban in the US federal government comes days after a similar decision by the European Commission, which banned TikTok from its staff to “protect” the institution.
No “specific security issue”
The Government of Canada also announced Monday that it will ban TikTok from the mobile devices it provides to its staff starting Tuesday, citing “an unacceptable level of risk” to privacy and security. TikTok is already one of the Chinese applications banned in India since 2020. Canada launched an investigation into the Chinese social network last week to “ensure that the company respects (has) its transparency obligations”.
“On a mobile device, TikTok’s data collection methods provide considerable access to phone content,” says Treasury Department President Mona Fortier, adding in a statement that it was taken “as a preventive measure.” . “We have no reason to believe at this time that any government information has been compromised,” she added.
A spokeswoman for TikTok reacted by deploring a “curious” decision, taken “without citing any specific security problem”, and by regretting that the platform was not contacted by the government.
With more than a billion active users worldwide, TikTok is the sixth most used social platform, according to We Are Social’s latest digital evolution report, published in January. TikTok acknowledged in November that some employees in China could access European user data, and admitted in December that employees had used that data to stalk journalists. But the group denies any Chinese government control or access to its data.