European Commission orders staff to remove TikTok from devices

London: The employees of the European Commission (EC) were ordered to remove the Chinese short-video-making app TikTok from their corporate devices on Thursday, IANS reports.

The Corporate Management Board of EC decided to stop the application n its corporate devices and on personal devices enrolled in the Commission mobile device service.

In a statement, EC said, "This measure aims to protect the Commission against cybersecurity threats and actions which may be exploited for cyber-attacks against the corporate environment of the Commission. The security developments of other social media platforms will also be kept under constant review."

Employees must remove the application on their personal devices too, which they use for work purposes.

The Commission said, "The measure is in line with the Commission's strict internal cybersecurity policies for the use of mobile devices for work-related communications. It complements long-standing Commission advice to staff to apply best practices when using social media platforms and keep high-level cyber awareness in their daily work."

Recently, the US House of Representatives directed its staff to uninstall TikTok from official work devices.

Also, US Senator Michael Bennett this month urged Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai to immediately remove TikTok from their app stores. He called the app a risk to national security.

In the US, TikTok is currently the third most popular app, having 100 million American users who spend more than 80 minutes per day on the app. The country plans to impose a nationwide ban on the app. The House Foreign Affairs Committee is about to vote on the matter.

India banned TikTok and several other Chinese apps for allegedly sharing user data with China in 2020.