New Zealand will ban the app tick tock about its lawmakers’ toolkit, their authority told AFP on Friday, joining other Western countries in taking this step over security concerns over Chinese-owned platforms. The chief executive of the Parliamentary Service, Rafael Gonzalez-Montero, explained that the app will be banned from March 31 on all devices that have access to the parliamentary network.
Gonzalez-Montero said the risk was “unacceptable in the current New Zealand Parliament environment.” “This decision was made based on the analysis of our own experts and after discussions with our government and international counterparts,” he added. The United States, Canada and the United Kingdom have also banned the popular platform of Chinese group ByteDance on government devices out of fear that authorities in China could gain access to the data.
The European Commission has also ordered its employees to uninstall apps on their devices. The first action was taken in 2020 in India, which banned various Chinese apps after clashes at the disputed border between the two Asian giants.
That same year, the then president of the United States, Donald Trump, made accusations tick tock to gather information for China. tick tock admitted that ByteDance employees in China had accessed US account details, but always denied that he would turn over the details to authorities in Beijing.
The current US President, Joe Biden, has threatened to ban the app completely if it does not divest from ByteDance.
Britain orders ‘with immediate effect’ removal of TikTok from government equipment
The app, which can be used to share short videos, is hugely popular with young people, but its critics warn that Chinese authorities have access to the data of its users around the world, something that tick tock deny. This was a “precautionary” measure, according to the minister. “We know that use has been limited tick tock within the government, but it’s about good cyber hygiene,” he said.
“Given the special risks around government devices, which may contain sensitive information, it is prudent and proportionate to limit the use of some applications,” especially those that access and store “large amounts of data,” it said.
Similar actions were taken in the United States, Canada and the European Union. On Thursday, China urged the United States to stop “unjustified attacks”. tick tockafter the United States asked the company to separate from its Chinese parent, ByteDance, to avoid being banned in the country, citing national security.
“The United States has not provided any evidence of that tick tock threatens the national security of the United States,” China’s diplomatic spokesman, Wang Wenbin, told reporters.
– With information from AFP –
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