Canada Bans TikTok on Government Devices Due to Security Risks as It is a Chinese-owned Video-sharing App!

By Rupinder Kaur On Mar 5, 2023

Canada has joined the US and EU in banning TikTok from being installed on all government-issued mobile devices. This is part of a move by western governments to deal with the video-sharing app, which is owned by China.

The Guardian said that Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has banned the video-sharing app TikTok from all government-owned phones because western officials are worried about it. When talking about the latest news about TikTok, Trudeau said that the TikTok app might or might not go through any more steps. Last week, the executive branch of the European Union banned employees from using TikTok on their phones as a security measure.

Before the EU, the US did the same thing to the Chinese app TikTok. More than half of the states and Congress have banned TikTok from official government devices. TikTok, a Chinese app, is popular with young people, but the fact that it is owned by China has made people worry that Beijing might use it to collect information and push its pro-China message. ByteDance, a Chinese company whose headquarters will move to Singapore in 2020, owns TikTok.

Over the years, the company has been hurt by a number of scandals. It admitted in December that it had used its app to spy on some US journalists as part of an investigation into leaks. As a result, it fired at least four people. Also, it has been shown over and over that it is less independent from its Chinese ownership than it says it is. For example, its moderation guidelines (which have since been changed) helped Beijing’s foreign policy, and there are still links between the code base of TikTok and its sister app in mainland China, Douyin.

But despite investigations on different continents, no smoking gun has been found to show that TikTok’s data harvesting is anything more than the same “surveillance capitalism” that competitors like Facebook and Instagram use to sell targeted ads. Instead, TikTok has been asked to explain what it would do if the Chinese government forced it to do something.

Mona Fortier, the head of the Canadian Treasury Board, said that the federal government would also stop people from downloading the app on official devices in the future.