Austria on Wednesday banned the installation of the popular Chinese short video application TikTok on the work phones of state public employees due to security concerns. security.
The Federal Government has decided to prohibit the private use and the installation of TikTok on the official devices of the federal employees“, explained the Ministry of the Interior to EFE in a statement.
The decision was adopted after an in-depth evaluation of the application in collaboration with experts from various ministries, specialists in Data Protectioncomputing and intelligence services.
“To the eliminate The application excludes, as far as possible, access to state information”, concludes the Ministry of the Interior, which stresses that the measure does not affect private devices.
Austria, a neutral country and a member of the European Union (EU), thus follows the US, UK, Australia, France and the Netherlands, as well as the European Commission and the European Parliament, which had already banned the application on their official devices.
The concern for the privacy of the data stems from a 2017 Chinese law that allows authorities to request personal data from companies if it is deemed relevant to national security.
Although China has repeated that this regulation does not represent a threat to private users, TikTok acknowledged that they had collected personal information of journalists in the past.
The company alleges that it was the individual action of several workers who were fired.
TikTok, with more than a billion users around the world, is one of the most popular mobile applications among young people.