New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada are some of the countries that have imposed a ban on the TikTok application against officials or authorities due to security fears of the platform.

In the case of New Zealand, the decision is recent. The executive head of the parliamentary services, Rafael Gonzalez-Montero, explained that from March 31, the application will be banned on all devices with access to the parliamentary network.

Gonzalez-Montero said the risks are “unacceptable in the current environment of the New Zealand Parliament”.

TikTok: why the United States, Canada and the European Commission have banned the app on their official phones

“This decision was made based on the analysis of our own experts and after consultation with our colleagues in government and internationally,” he added.

The United Kingdom instead made the decision on Thursday. “We are going to ban the use of TikTok on government devices” with “immediate effect,” Secretary of State Oliver Dowden, whose portfolio includes cybersecurity issues, told Parliament.

“Given the specific risk surrounding government devices, which may contain sensitive information, it is prudent and proportionate to restrict the use of some applications,” particularly those that access and store “significant amounts of data.”

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The fear of governments is that the Chinese authorities can get to user data. This follows the platform’s revelation that ByteDance employees had access to US account data.

The first such action was taken in 2020 in India, which banned several Chinese apps following clashes on the disputed border between the two Asian giants.

That same year, then-President of the United States, Donald Trump, accused TikTok of collecting information for China.

China, for its part, has rejected the position of several countries. “The United States has so far not provided any evidence that TikTok threatens the national security of the United States,” a Chinese diplomacy spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters.

Several security experts have indicated that TikTok is not the only app that collects user data, but also others such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and Instagram.

In statements to Daily Mail, Privacy Compliance Hub co-founder Nigel Jones indicated that the situation with TikTok is due to its origins.

“The fear here is twofold: the Chinese government will get access to the data TikTok stores about us; And are you going to use TikTok as a source of disinformation?” he said.