- Joe Tidy
- Network affairs special correspondent
Denmark’s public broadcaster is advising employees not to use TikTok on work phones due to safety concerns.
The Danish broadcaster (DR) said it made the decision following a security review and warning from the Danish Center for Cyber Security.
Journalists who need to use the app for data-gathering must now apply for permission to use a dedicated device that employees call a “TikTok phone.”
The Danish Broadcasting Corporation is the first news organization to issue such guidance.
TikTok operates out of Singapore, but its parent company, ByteDance, is headquartered in Beijing, raising concerns in Europe and the US that the Chinese government could force it to spy on users and hand over data.
TikTok and ByteDance have always denied the allegations.
But the denials did little to reassure the Danish broadcaster, which also announced the end of a project to distribute content on the hugely popular social networking app platform.
“All employees are now advised not to use and install the TikTok app on their work phones,” CEO Niels Ammitzbøll told Danish Broadcasting Corporation employees.
“In order to ensure that you continue to use this medium for your journalistic work if necessary, mobile phones have been purchased separately as a tool for using TikTok.”
The BBC has issued no guidance on TikTok and has in fact expanded its use of the app as a platform for news reporting.
various announced actions
image source,Getty images
In just three years after its appearance, Douyin’s market share has surpassed all Western social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
On Wednesday, TikTok’s European arm announced detailed plans it hopes will strengthen trust in its data security practices.
“Project Clover” (Project Clover) will build a data center in Ireland, and there will be another security company “monitoring data flow”. The company also said it would take steps to make it more difficult to identify individual users in big data.
In the United States, a similar project, Project Texas, is also underway.
But the day before the announcement of “Project Clover,” President Joe Biden gave the administration’s support to a bill — led by Democrat Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Republicans Bill pushed by John Thune to ban some investments in foreign technology companies.
Since December, several high-profile institutions have announced action against TikTok:
- Dec. 28: TikTok banned in U.S. House-issued device
- December 29: TikTok is banned on all US federal government installations
- February 23: European Commission and Council of Europe employees are ordered to remove the app from their work phones and corporate devices
- February 28: TikTok disabled on all Canadian government-distributed devices
- February 28: TikTok disabled on European Parliament staff phones
- February 28: Danish parliament urges politicians and employees to remove app
- March 1: White House gives government agencies 30 days to ensure all employees do not have TikTok installed on federal government installations
- March 9: Danish broadcaster (DR) advises employees to delete the app
image source,Getty Images
Since 2020, TikTok executives have repeatedly tried to reassure the public that Chinese employees cannot access the data of non-Chinese users.
TikKok said such a ban is “misguided and does nothing to promote privacy and security.”
China has also firmly opposed the move.
Mao Ning, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said: “As the world‘s largest power, the United States is so afraid of an app that young people like, it is too unconfident.”
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will testify before the U.S. Congress later this month.
On Tuesday, TikTok told BBC Radio 4’s “World Tonight” (World Tonight) program that it was worried that TikTok would become a “pawn” in tense diplomatic relations between the United States and China.
“It’s hard to deny that we’re caught up in that very broad set of geopolitics, none of which is really about us,” said Michael Beckerman, the firm’s director of U.S. public policy.
“Almost all big tech companies have engineers in China,” he said, and TikTok isn’t the only company collecting user data on a massive scale.