Federal employees are already banned from downloading or accessing Tiktok on government devices
New York City is the latest U.S. jurisdiction to ban TikTok on phones and devices used by city workers, following several U.S. states and government agencies that recently took similar action.
The move came after an alert from NYC Cyber Command that TikTok posed “a security risk to the city’s technical networks,” according to an official statement.
Agencies working for the city have 30 days to remove the app from all devices issued to their employees, while city-operated TikTok accounts have already changed their bios to read, “This account was managed by NYC until in August 2023. It is no longer monitored.”
The move coincides with buzz generated by the NYC Department of Sanitation’s TikTok account, which featured a fun mix of content featuring its employees, as well as memes to connect citizens with local officials. .
Federal employees are already banned from downloading or accessing Tiktok on government devices, due to suspicions that the app owned by Chinese company ByteDance is allegedly providing users’ personal data to Beijing.
An investigation published by Forbes magazine in 2022 exposed ByteDance’s concrete plans to use data provided by TikTok to monitor users’ locations in the US, while a separate report showed that hundreds of employees of the platform and its parent company had previously worked in Chinese state-controlled media.
Hearing before the US Congress in March on this issue, the CEO of Tiktok, Shou Zi Chew, claimed to have seen “no evidence” of such transfer of user data to Chinese authorities.
2023-08-21 05:55:00
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