MADRID, April 4th. (EUROPEAN PRESS) –

The Australian government has banned the installation of the TikTok app this Tuesday on mobile phones and other devices connected to the public administration, in line with decisions that have been adopted by the United States Administration or the European Commission in recent months.

Australia’s Attorney General, Mark Dreyfus, has made it clear the ban will take effect “as soon as possible” and exemptions will be granted on a case-by-case basis, according to Australia’s ABC network.

“After receiving advice from intelligence and security agencies, today I have authorized the Secretary of the Attorney General’s Department to issue a binding order under the Security Protection Policy Framework,” he said.

Australia thus became the latest country from the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence alliance (FVEY, for its English abbreviation) – also made up of Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US – to block the app.

Fears have been growing in the West over the potential use of TikTok — which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance — as a Trojan horse to promote pro-China propaganda or collect user data, but Beijing has lambasted that after this cascade of vetoes it hides political intentions without any real technological justification. even.

In December, the social network made changes to its privacy policy, giving Chinese employees access to European users’ data, though it’s not clear what data these employees had access to and which employees were involved.