All elected officials have received an email warning them against using foreign applications. Advice directly related to the accusations against TikTok.
MPs will have to considerably limit their use of foreign applications such as TikTok, Telegram, Snapchat, Instagram or WhatsApp. At least, if they want to stick to cybersecurity best practices. In an email consulted by Tech&Co and mentioned on March 22 by the media Politicothe three quaestors of the National Assembly Éric Ciotti, Marie Guevenoux and Éric Woerth call on all elected officials to be “extremely vigilant” vis-à-vis the sharing of sensitive information on foreign applications.
No work phones
“Declared as used for commercial purposes and customer profiling, all of your data is held by the companies responsible for these applications. These companies depend on an extraterritorial right to Europe which is largely to the detriment of French users and this data can in particular be donated to the benefit of foreign intelligence services” they explain, in the letter dated March 20.
As Marie Guévenoux mentioned to Tech&Co in early March, this warning is directly linked to the many debates surrounding the use of the TikTok application, some data of which could be used by the Chinese government for espionage purposes. Information that is all the more sensitive when it is linked to deputies, who are now very present on social networks.
“Given the particular risks to which the exercise of their mandate exposes the deputies who use these applications, we would like to call on your extreme vigilance and recommend that you limit their use”, warns the National Assembly, which recommends using the French application Wimi for their exchanges.
Still with Tech & Co, Marie Guévenoux recalled that the deputies have the freedom to use their smartphone as they see fit, having no professional mobile dedicated to their mandate.
At the global level, many Western countries – as well as the European Commission – prohibit their elected officials or civil servants from using the TikTok application, a subsidiary of the ByteDance group, which refuses to put an end to data transfers from its European users to China. .
