The Commission has asked its employees to remove the application from their electronic equipment for security reasons, according to a source close to the European institution.
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The European Commission prohibits its employees from using the Chinese application TikTok, for security reasons, learned franceinfo Thursday, February 23, from a source close to the European institution, confirming information from Politico.
In an internal communication, which the international editorial staff of Radio France was able to consult, the Commission asks its employees and civil servants to remove the application from their electronic devices in order to protect the institution’s data and increase its cyber security. A ban that applies to business telephones, but also to personal telephones when work applications linked to the Commission are installed there, in particular e-mail and applications for videoconferencing.
Starting March 15, all electronic devices that retain the TikTok app will be considered “non-compliant” to the rules of the institution. A measure that the Commission considers “necessary” because of “application-related data protection issues”which she considers to be “a potential threat to its cyber security”.
In question, access to personal data
In a press release published last Friday, TikTok nevertheless claimed to want “to secure” And “protect” the data of its users in Europe. For this, the Chinese social network promised to “restrict its employees’ access to European user data”. TikTok is also planning the opening in Dublin of a “European Center for Transparency and Accountability”.
TikTok, which now has 150 million monthly active users in Europe (out of 32 countries), must comply with the European Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will come into force from mid-2023. These European regulations aim to regulate the internet and social networks. In the United States, a law passed in December 2022 banned the use of the app in the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as on public servants’ devices.
In November, ByteDance, parent company of TikTok, admitted that several of its employees had had access to the data of two American journalists who wrote about the company. In Europe, some legislators fear that the Chinese group ByteDance may access users’ personal data and ultimately transmit them to the Chinese authorities.
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