TikTok app to be banned from UK Government phones amid security fears over Chinese social media giant’s links to Communist regime in Beijing
TikTok will be banned on Government phones, ministers are expected to announce today.
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Oliver Dowden will announce the move in the Commons in a statement this afternoon.
The restriction comes in response to concerns that users’ sensitive data could be accessed by the authorities in Beijing from the firm’s owner ByteDance, which has its headquarters in China.
Members of the Government and officials are also expected to be discouraged from keeping the controversial video-sharing app on their personal phones, after safety risks were identified by the intelligence services.
It follows moves by the US, the EU and Canada to stop officials using the app on their work devices, and comes after the Government declared that China ‘poses an epoch-defining challenge’.
It comes after the Biden administration threatened to ban TikTok in the US unless its Chinese owner sells its shares in the app.
It is the first time the administration has explicitly threatened a ban and represents a shift in its attitude towards the platform, which Republicans have said is a national security threat for the way it harvests data from US citizens.
The demand was made by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States and specifies that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, sell its stake in the US version of the app.
It is unclear whether federal officials have given ByteDance a deadline to sell.
