JAKARTA - The US House of Representatives has ordered all staff to remove TikTok from all cellphones issued by the House. This is known according to an internal memo obtained by NBC News. The order was issued by Catherine L. Szpindor, Chief Administration Officer of the US House of Representatives, who also banned the popular social media app from being downloaded on any future House-issued devices.
CAO's Cybersecurity Office believes TikTok to be "high risk to users" due to a lack of transparency regarding how its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, handles customer data.
"House of Representatives staff are NOT permitted to download the TikTok app on any of the House's mobile devices," the memo said. "If you have the TikTok app on your House of Representatives mobile device, you will be contacted to remove it."
Local governments in 19 states have also banned TikTok on government-issued devices.
Brooke Oberwetter, a spokesperson for TikTok, told The Wall Street Journal that the move was a political signal rather than a practical solution to security concerns, and claimed the ban would have minimal impact because very few House of Representatives-controlled phones have TikTok installed.
The directive follows several other attempts to limit the use of TikTok in the US due to concerns that the Chinese government could use the app to track and spy on people in the US.
TikTok is already banned on government-owned devices by local governments in 19 US states citing security concerns, and a bill passed by Congress on December 23 contains language banning the app on cell phones issued to employees of agencies in the executive branch, with exceptions for law enforcement, national security, and research purposes.
TikTok itself is also negotiating a deal with the US Department of Justice to resolve national security issues.
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TikTok has long denied that its handling of user data is a concern, alleging that US users' data is not stored in China and the information is not shared with the Chinese government.
The company pledged to "seriously address any security concerns it has raised at both the federal and state levels" in a statement last week following the passage of the bill by Congress.
According to The Verge report, many members of Congress actually have a presence on TikTok, and although lawmakers and House staff are now being asked to remove the app, this directive still doesn't apply to the Senate. Some senators like Marco Rubio recently called for a nationwide ban on TikTok in the US.
TikTok has to work hard if it wants to convince the US government that the platform can be trusted. On December 23, an internal investigation found that several ByteDance employees had accessed the TikTok data of US journalists, despite previously claiming it had never been used to target individuals such as members of the US government or journalists.
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