Posted on 11/30/2022 2:46:35 AM PST by Libloather
Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, has signed an executive order prohibiting government employees, agencies and contractors from downloading and using TikTok on state-owned devices. In her office's announcement, Noem said she issued the order due to growing security concerns that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been using the social media app to gather information from American users and leveraging it to manipulate them. The order is already in effect and also prohibits government personnel from visiting the TikTok website on browsers.
"South Dakota will have no part in the intelligence gathering operations of nations who hate us," Noem said. "The Chinese Communist Party uses information that it gathers on TikTok to manipulate the American people, and they gather data off the devices that access the platform."
US officials have been raising security concerns about TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, over the past few years over the belief that the Chinese government is using it to gather data. In 2020, then-President Trump attempted to block TikTok and WeChat in the US. While that didn't quite go anywhere, nearly the entire US military had banned the app on government-issued devices, calling TikTok a "cybersecurity threat." A couple of Republican Senators also introduced a bill in the same year that would ban all government employees from using TikTok on work-issued smartphones.
More recently, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr asked Apple and Google to remove the app from their stores after a BuzzFeed News report came out that China-based ByteDance employees repeatedly accessed US users' private information. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew assured Republican Senators in a letter after the report came out that the company is working with Oracle to protect the data of its users in the US "with robust, independent oversight."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Good public policy, easily enforced with most any ‘MDM’ software.
My employer prohibits it on all corporate owned devices, and yet the ‘genius’ millennials/ Gen-stupids in corporate marketing launched an internal sweepstakes that utilized a Tik Tok video.
They got roasted in the comments, especially by folks in our network security team.
I am convinced that 90% of marketing staff could go away and we’d only function better.
“ In 2020, then-President Trump attempted to block TikTok and WeChat in the US”
Trump was right again
For that, and a couple of other good reasons, I stay off all social media. (and I’m not antisocial)
There’s a lot of brain dead idiots (Left and Right) whose lives revolve around social media with their heads buried in there phones 24/7. Take away that capability and they’ll cease to function which in reality would be little difference except you’d have to put up with whining.
Tim Cook will keep TikTok but ban Twitter.
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