France: France has banned the “recreational” use of TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and other apps on the phones of government employees because of worries about inadequate data security measures.

According to a tweet from the Ministry of Public Sector Reform and the Civil Service, the restriction will take effect right away.

“In order to guarantee the cybersecurity of our administrations and civil servants, the government has decided to ban recreational applications such as TikTok on the professional phones of civil servants,” Mr. Stanislas Guerini remarked.

Mr. Guerini continued by saying that several of France’s European and international allies had implemented restrictions on or outright bans on the use of the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok by their governments for a number of weeks.

Guerini asserted that recreational applications lack the cybersecurity and data protection standards necessary to be installed on the hardware of administrations, but added that exceptions might be made for legitimate business needs, including institutional communications of an administration.

The White House, the UK parliament, the Dutch and Belgian administrations, the New Zealand parliament, and the governments of Canada, India, Pakistan, Taiwan, and Jordan are just a few of the countries and institutions that have banned TikTok in recent weeks.

American lawmakers and national security officials have been the most outspoken in voicing their concerns about the claimed security hazards posed by TikTok. They claim that the Chinese government may be able to access user data collected by the app.

During questioning by US senators on 23rd March 2023, the company’s CEO, Mr. Shou Zi Chew, denied claims that TikTok or ByteDance are instruments of the Chinese government. The business has repeatedly stated that international institutional investors own 60 percent of ByteDance.

WORLD ROUNDUP: Codebreakers decode Secret messages from Mary Queen of Scots’ letters