Government officials are no longer allowed to use TikTok on their phones. Why Facebook, which has often been criticized for violating privacy rules, still?
The cabinet bans TikTok on the work phone of government officials. The app with short videos that is used by almost half of the Dutch youth (15-19 years old) has now also lost its innocence in the Netherlands. Earlier, the European Commission and Council, Belgium, the United Kingdom and the United States already banned the Chinese app for the civil service.
Cold War
TikTok is as if Russia could control the television programming of the entire Western world during the Cold War, Tristian Harris recently said. And with that, the American technology ethicist clarified, it can push its own propaganda into the living rooms of the enemy. More than half a century later, TikTok can adjust the flow of videos per user and thus influence them.
In addition, the app collects a lot of information. Not only the messages that are sent, but also which connections the user has. Although TikTok flatly denies that it exchanges data with the Chinese government and lacks evidence, appearances are against it. The business magazine Forbes recently revealed that three hundred employees of TikTok and parent company ByteDance have previously worked for the Chinese government.
Sensitive to espionage
Added to all global developments, ASML no longer supplying the most advanced chip machines to China and the government’s earlier ban on using Huawei equipment in the telecom network, a logical step by the cabinet to ban TikTok from official telephones . Although Alexandra van Huffelen, State Secretary for Digitization, announces that more espionage-sensitive apps from countries with a so-called ‘offensive cyber program’ will be banned, the question is whether that is sufficient. Facebook, American and with more than 10 million users in the Netherlands much larger, is certainly not the best boy in the class and has been criticized several times for not complying with the privacy rules. In short: the security of all of us’s phones deserves a much broader and more serious approach than just banning a number of apps for government officials.