TikTok officially banned from US government smartphones

US government staff are no longer allowed to use the Chinese-built social media app

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

If you’re an employee of the US government and love creating and watching TikTok videos, we have some bad news for you.

The Committee on House Administration (COA) has contacted staff saying they are no longer allowed to have the app installed on House-managed mobileendpoints.

“The Office of Cybersecurity has been deemed the TikTok mobile application to be a high risk to users due to a number of security risks,” the department noted in anemailsent to its workers.

Comprehensive ban

Anyone working in the lower chamber will need to remove the app immediately from their devices, or risk being contacted by the COA Office of Cybersecurity.

TheTikTok banwill also extend to other organizations within the US government soon. The $1.66 trillion recent omnibus spending bill, which now sits on President Biden’s approval, includes a more comprehensive ban, preventing all federally-managed devices from installing the now-infamous app.

TikTok has gained huge popularity lately and is now considered the world’s number one social media platform. However, it is owned and operated by ByteDance, a Chinese software company, and given China’s policy towardsprivacy, data management, and human rights, it soon drew scrutiny from the U.S. government.

TikTok is now the most downloaded app worldwide>TikTok hack: Have billions of user records been exposed?>These are the best ID theft protection tools right now

As a result, back in 2020, former president Donald Trump issued an executive order stating TikTok was a “threat” and banned US companies from transacting with the app.

Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!

At the time, the Trump administration even tried to force the company to sell its US operations to a domestic buyer, in an attempt to keep the data generated on-premises and protected from possible exfiltration by the Chinese government.

While both the company and the Chinese government denied any mishandling of the data, earlier this month ByteDance confirmed its employees accessed user data belonging to journalists, in an attempt to find out who leaked a certain set of information.

What’s more, last summer, the company confirmed Chinese employees had access to US user data.

Via:The Register

Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.

This new phishing strategy utilizes GitHub comments to distribute malware

Should your VPN always be on?

NYT Strands today — hints, answers and spangram for Sunday, November 10 (game #252)