After Europe and Canada, the United States bans the installation and use of TikTok by employees of federal agencies. And there are good reasons for that.
Less than a week ago, the European Commission banned its employees from the presence of theapplicationapplication TikTok on their smartphones. They have until March 15 to comply. A similar decision will be taken for the staff of the European Council. It was the fear of a potential leak of personal data to Beijing that prompted the institution to take this measure.
After this precautionary decision in Europe, on Monday, Canada also asked its officials to remove TikTokTikTok from their phone. While they’re usually a frontrunner for this kind of drastic move, it was yesterday that the US also ordered federal agencies to ensure their employees no longer have the TikTok app on their mobile. . They have 30 days to execute. Internet traffic from this app is also blocked on US government devices.
Spy precedents
Even if, for the rest of the population, TikTok is still authorized, this decision has sparked since its announcement the discontent of promoters of freedom of speech and expression who see it as the equivalent of a total ban.
In France, the President of the Republic, political figures and elected officials use TikTok to reach a young audience who are followers of the application. Some parliamentarians have even made broadcastsbroadcasts Live sessions at the National Assembly with this type of application. This resulted in the prohibition of the use of such platforms during the sessions. If TikTok is in the crosshairs of the authorities, it is because its parent company admitted last November that some of its employees had access to the private data of users and that they had tracked down journalists thanks to them. On the other hand, the firm denies having any link with the Beijing authorities.
Is TikTok spying on you?
TikTok is once again accused of being a spywarespyware. According to a recent report by BuzzFeed, China continues to access US user data. An FCC commissioner just asked Tim CookTim Cook et Sundar PichaiSundar Pichai to remove the application from the App StoreStore and Google Play.
Article d’Edward BackEdward Backpublished on July 2, 2022
The controversy swells again around the social networksocial network Chinese TikTok. In 2020, he was charged with illegal information gathering. Donald Trump then signed an executive order against the publisher ByteDance. This time it’s Brendan Carr, an FCC commissioner (Federal Communications Commission) which challenged Google and Apple on TwitterTwitter to ask them to remove TikTok from their app stores.
The charges are based on an investigation by BuzzFeed News, which analyzed 80-hour audio recordings of “leaked” internal meetings. So far, TikTok has tried to reassure the US government that all US user data is hosted in the United States.
However, in these records, BuzzFeed found fourteen claims indicating that China was accessing the data, at least between September 2021 and January 2022, and probably beyond. They speak in particular of a chief administrator, a ” Master Admin in Beijing, which would have access to everything. Just hours after the accusations were published, TikTok announced that all US user data had migrated to serversservers d’OracleOracle and are only accessible from the United States.
The FCC commissioner also cites other violations, such as when the application circumvented the security ofAndroidAndroid in 2020 to collect private data. He also recalls that India banned the app in the country following the data theft and accuses the app of being ” an unacceptable risk to national security “. However, Brendan Carr speaks only for himself, the other commissioners having not yet taken a position. It remains to be seen if Apple and Google will grant its request in the United States, and if this will have repercussions on the application in Europe.
TikTok would have collected personal data illegally for more than a year
The Chinese social network TikTok is accused by the Wall Street Journal to have recovered themac addressmac address users on Android, for 15 months until November 2019. An illegal practice that could reinforce the desire of the United States to ban the application on its soil.
Article by Fabrice Auclert, published on 08/13/2020
And if Donald Trump was right… While the President of the United States declared war on TikTok, guilty according to him of being at the heels of the Chinese government by collecting and then giving up users’ personal data, the Wall Street Journal reports that the app violated Google’s Privacy Policy.
Until November 2019, TikTok managed to collect the Mac address of users, a unique identifier specific to each connected device, and in this case to smartphones. This private data was collected to target users for advertising purposes, but also to file them. This is classic with software such as “adware” and others malwaremalwarebut it is strictly prohibited by Google, and its Play Store for several years, which requires that the Mac address be neither visible nor collected.
The latest version of TikTok is risk-free
According to the American daily, which relies on reports from security experts, Tik Tok circumvented the regulations by encrypting its Mac address recovery function, and this is obviously illegal. The newspaper specifies that this collection would have concerned millions of users on a durationduration about 15 months.
For its part, the leaders of the social network have confessed half-word since they explain that ” the current version of TikTok does not collect Mac addresses » and that they encourage « users to download the latest version ». The Wall Street Journal tested this latest version, and indeed, collecting the Mac address is no longer possible. Recall that on iPhone, TikTok was one of the applications that accessed the copy-paste of users.
