The Australian government recently decided to stop their employees from using TikTok, which is an app that lets people make and share short videos. The government is worried that the company that owns TikTok has connections to the Chinese government and that the Chinese government could get access to information about TikTok users.
Following the action, some experts think that it is a good idea to ban TikTok, and they also think other social media apps should be banned too.
Furthermore, an increasing number of government agencies in Australia are taking action to prohibit the use of the widely-used ByteDance app.
This is due to heightened security concerns surrounding the app's connection to China, prompting worries about potential risks and threats to national security.
“I don’t think it’s as simple as TikTok – bad; American companies – good, I think they’re all bad,” Professor Vanessa Teague, a cybersecurity researcher at the Australian National University reported.
The Canberra Times newspaper has reported that almost half of the government agencies in Australia have stopped their employees from using TikTok on devices owned by the government.
Teague mentioned that although Apple and Google offer users more control over what data they share with social media apps, these apps can still gather a significant amount of information on their users.
“It’s all well and good to turn off location permission, but if you then upload a photo or a video that has your GPS coordinates … then you told them where you are, so it’s better but it doesn’t completely solve the problem…,” Teague told. “…I don’t actually think they’re really solving the problem unless they’re solving the problem of Australians’ privacy and security, which would mean strong privacy laws, better education, encouragement of end-to-end encryption, and an end to this nonsense that encryption is only for paedophiles.”
Although many people are mainly worried about TikTok, the Department of Home Affairs is looking at all social media apps to see if they are safe to use or not. The home affairs minister has asked for this review, and the report will be ready in the first three months of this year.
