Australia bans TikTok on government devices after security review
Australia will announce a ban on TikTok on government phones this week after other countries banned the Chinese video app over security concerns, Australian newspapers reported late Monday.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese agreed to a government-wide ban on TikTok following an investigation by the Home Office, an Australian newspaper reported.
The state of Victoria is also banning a short video app from government phones, The Age newspaper reported, citing a state government official as saying that Victoria would follow the federal government’s guidelines.
The US, UK, New Zealand, Canada, Belgium and the European Commission have already banned the app from official devices for security reasons.
TikTok has come under increasing scrutiny amid fears that user data on the app, owned by Beijing-based company ByteDance, could end up in the hands of the Chinese government, undermining Western security interests.
The Age quoted Tiktok Australia CEO Lee Hunter as saying the company was disappointed to learn of the ban through the media “despite our repeated offers to engage constructively with the government about this policy”.
“We stress that there is no evidence that TikTok is in any way a security risk to Australians and should not be treated any differently to other social media platforms,” he said.
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