It Took 4 Years to Ban Chinese Spyware TikTok from Government Devices
It Took 4 Years to Ban Chinese Spyware TikTok from Government Devices
Why was TikTok on any federal government device?
By Daniel Greenfield
Don’t say the government “never did anything for ya.”
It took 4 years since TikTok really went worldwide but the federal government will finally bar TikTok, which has been demonstrated to be Chinese government spyware from our own government devices.
TikTok will be banned from all federal government devices under the spending bill, a move intended to assuage heightened privacy and national security concerns about the app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
U.S. officials have argued that TikTok, which has an estimated 100 million users in the United States, can share sensitive data about the location, personal habits and interests of Americans with the Chinese government.
And that took 4 years.
A basic question would be why TikTok was on any federal government device. Ever. Period.
TikTok is a personal entertainment app. There was no reason to have such apps on federal government devices. Even American social media platforms, as we’ve seen with Twitter, have lousy security and are highly compromised. And free apps routinely hoover up user data in payment. Federal government devices shouldn’t have any apps that are not work-related and that don’t undergo a security review.
TikTok qualifies under none of these metrics. And yet somehow it took four years to do the sane thing.
Now watch the ban be routinely ignored anyway while China continues spying on us.