Belgium follows footsteps of US and EU, bans TikTok from government phones

The government in Belgium also banned TikTok from government phones over concerns of misinformation, privacy and cybersecurity, said the country's prime minister on Friday.

The step taken is similar to the recent ban imposed on the video sharing app by the government authorities in the United States and Europe.

According to a post shared on Alexander de Croo’s website, TikTok will be prohibited temporarily for at least six months from the devices which the federal government of Belgium owns or is paying for.

No immediate response was given by TikTok. The company, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, has for a long time maintained that no data of the application is shared with the Chinese government and that the data is not held in China.

This week, new measures were unveiled by TikTok to ease concerns being raised about user data protection in Europe.

But the three main institutions of the European Union and the defence ministry of Denmark have already given orders to their employees to delete the application from mobile devices which are being used for official business.

The governments have imposed similar bans in Canada and the US. De Croo said that the ban imposed by Belgium was based on the warning issued by its cybersecurity centre and the state security service, which stated that the user data can be harvested by the application and algorithms can be tweaked to manipulate its content and news feed.

The officials further warned that TikTok can be forced to spy for Beijing, he stated.

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“We are in a new geopolitical context where influence and surveillance between states have shifted to the digital world,” said de Croo, in an online statement.

“We must not be naive: TikTok is a Chinese company which today is obliged to cooperate with the intelligence services. This is the reality. Prohibiting its use on federal service devices is common sense,” he added.

(With inputs from agencies)

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