The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Tuesday (February 28) ordered US federal agencies to uninstall the Chinese social network TikTok from their devices within 30 days. Owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, the application has been targeted by American lawmakers, who consider it a threat to national security, and had banned its use on civil servants' devices in a law passed at the end of December 2022.
The OMB's order is taken pursuant to this law, ratified in early January by President Joe Biden. In a memorandum, the director of this office, Shalanda Young, called on government agencies to "remove and prohibit installations" of the application on devices owned or managed by them, and to "prohibit Internet traffic from these devices to the app.
The ultra-popular short and viral video platform, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, is increasingly scrutinized by Westerners who fear that Beijing could thus access the data of users around the world. This ban in the US federal government comes days after a similar decision by the European Commission, which banned TikTok from its staff to "protect" the institution.
The Government of Canada also announced on Monday that it will ban TikTok from the mobile devices it provides to its staff starting Tuesday, citing "an unacceptable level of risk" to privacy and security. TikTok has already been among the Chinese apps banned in India since 2020.
With more than a billion active users worldwide, TikTok is the sixth most used social platform, according to We Are Social's latest digital evolution report, published in January.
TikTok acknowledged in November that some employees in China could access European user data, and admitted in December that employees had used that data to stalk journalists. But the group denies any Chinese government control or access to its data.
