NATO Washington: The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has banned its staff from downloading social media platform TikTok on its provided devices.
NATO has reportedly taken the movie citing security issues.
NATO officials sent a note to staff on Friday morning announcing the ban, the officials said. The note made the ban official, but TikTok was not really usable on NATO-issued devices before, anyway, the officials said, because of internal tech restrictions, reports CNN.
“Cyber security is a top priority for NATO. NATO has robust requirements for determining applications for official business use. TikTok is not accessible on NATO devices,” a senior NATO official told CNN.
NATO is the latest governmental body to ban the app over concerns that the Chinese government could have access to TikTok users’ data through its Chinese parent company, Bytedance. The US, UK, Norway, European Parliament and other nations have already banned the app from government-issued devices.
TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew stressed to US lawmakers earlier this month that the company is completely independent from Beijing, and said that he has “seen no evidence that the Chinese government has access to that data; they have never asked us, we have not provided it.”
He told CNN that TikTok is moving its data into the US, to be stored on US soil by the American company Oracle.
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