United States Naval division and pretty soon other military services will impose a ban on the use of Chinese app TikTok on government-issued mobile devices. The reason to impose the ban is due to Cybersecurity reasons as some government-backed studies have revealed that the app steals data from the app and transmits it to servers located in China.
An update released last weekend on the Facebook page for the military personnel says that all those Naval staffs who don’t stop using the TikTok app and those who won’t delete the video-sharing app will be blocked from the Naval Marine Corps Intranet(NMCI).
“NMCI today has issued a directive to delete/uninstall the Chinese video-sharing app TikTok from government-issued devices”, Dave Benham, director of public affairs for US Fleet Cyber Command/US 10th Fleet.
Benham said that the decision was taken after analyzing a cyber threat report from the 10th Fleet to address existing and emerging cyber threats in defense-related networks.
Note 1- TikTok is a video sharing based networking website which is owned by ByteDance. It offers the privilege to its users to lip-sync or physically react to some popular songs, comedy clips and video recording efforts.
Note 2- The app happens to be most downloaded in the United States in Oct’18 and has mainly impressed most of the iOS device users.
Note 3- From the year 2018, the app has started to use Artificial Intelligence to offer personalized content to its users based on their interests.
Note 4– In Jan’19 a study conducted by the American think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics said that TikTok is emerging as a Huawei kind of problem posing as a national threat to the west. Furthermore, the research proved some Chinese apps like TikTok can transmit their user data to servers based in Beijing which thereafter customizes the app to conduct espionage on the app downloaded devices.
