- Mark Dreyfus (Australia’s attorney general) explained to Australian ABC that the ban will come into effect “as soon as possible.”
- The nations that have already outlawed TikTok are listed below.
- The owner of TikTok promotes a new app in the US: everything we know about Lemon8.
By recent judgments made by the US Administration or the European Commission, the Australian Government on Tuesday forbade the installation of the TikTok application on phones and other devices used by the public sector.
According to the Australian ABC network, Australia’s Attorney General, Mark Dreyfus, has stated that the prohibition will go into effect “as soon as feasible” and that exceptions will be made on a case-by-case basis.
He said, “I have authorized the Secretary of the Attorney General’s Department to make a binding order under the National Security Policy Framework after obtaining advice from intelligence and security agencies.
So, Australia has joined the ranks of the “Five Eyes” intelligence cooperation, which also consists of Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as the most recent nation to reject the proposal.
Fear has grown in the West about 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 hides a political intention without any kind of real technological justification.
In December, the social network changed its privacy policy, which gave Chinese employees access to data from European users. However, it’s unclear exactly what data these employees have access to and which employees are involved.