Another US state has banned TikTok from government-owned devices. Kansas joins over a dozen other states in forbidding government officials and other state employees from using the popular short-form video app on their state-issued smartphone or computer. Kansas Governor Laura Kelly has the same concerns with the app as her peers across the US. She fears that TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance could expose American users’ personal information to the country’s authoritarian government. The fear is that Beijing could use that data to spy on Americans.
Kansas joins several other states in banning TikTok
The US government has always had national security concerns with TikTok because it originates from China. There are fears that the Chinese Communist Party, aka CCP, may have backdoors into the company. Former US President Donald Trump even mulled outright banning the app in the country but that didn’t materialize.
ByteDance, meanwhile, tried to address the concerns by moving its headquarters from China to Singapore and switching to Oracle’s servers for keeping American users’ data within the nation. Things looked better for it for a couple of years. But TikTok has once again found itself in hot water. The popular short-form video app is getting banned left, right, and center.
Several US states and government agencies have already banned it from government-owned devices, including Alabama, Georgia, Iowa, Maryland, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and the US House of Representatives. Kansas is now joining them. The US Senate also voted earlier this month to bar federal employees from using TikTok.
Perhaps the recent revelation that TikTok spied on journalists may have fueled those fears. ByteDance has admitted that it tracked the location and IP addresses of US-based journalists from the Financial Times, Forbes, and other prominent publishing houses.
This certainly didn’t help the company’s already ill fame and may result in US lawmakers tightening their grip on it. And considering the timing of this news, We wouldn’t be surprised if more US states join the bandwagon of banning TikTok from government-issued devices in their respective states.
TikTok, meanwhile, doesn’t concede any wrongdoing. A company spokesperson told The Hill that these bans are politically-motivated and don’t stem from any concrete security threat. “We’re disappointed that so many states are jumping on the political bandwagon to enact policies that will do nothing to advance cybersecurity in their states and are based on unfounded falsehoods about TikTok,” TikTok spokesperson Jamal Brown said in an emailed statement. But there doesn’t seem to be any way out for the company. Stay tuned as the plot thickens for TikTok with each passing day.
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