The Australian Government has prohibited this Tuesday the installation of the TikTok application on phones and other devices linked to the public administration, in line with the decisions that the United States Administration or the European Commission have already adopted in recent months.
Australia’s Attorney General, Mark Dreyfus, has explained that the ban will come into effect “as soon as possible” and exceptions will be granted on a case-by-case basis, according to the Australian ABC network.
“After receiving advice from intelligence and security agencies, I have today authorized the Secretary of the Attorney General’s Department to issue a binding order under the Protective Security Policy Framework,” he said.
Australia has thus become the latest country from the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence alliance (FVEY, for its abbreviation in English) -also made up of Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States- to block the application.
Fear has increased in the West in relation to the possible use of TikTok -owned by the Chinese company ByteDance- as a Trojan horse to promote propaganda in favor of China or collect user data, but Beijing has denounced that behind this cascade of vetoes it is hiding a political intention without any kind of real technological justification.
In December, the social network made a change to its privacy policy, which gave Chinese employees access to the data of European users, though it’s unclear exactly what data these employees have access to and which employees are involved.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
