WASHINGTON, Jan 13 (Reuters) – Kentucky is becoming a member of greater than 20 U.S. states in banning the favored video app TikTok on authorities gadgets citing cybersecurity considerations.
The state mentioned it had up to date its worker handbook to bar state workers from utilizing government-managed gadgets to entry the Chinese language-owned app “aside from for a regulation enforcement goal.” On Thursday, the governors of Wisconsin and North Carolina signed orders banning TikTok on authorities gadgets. Ohio, New Jersey and Arkansas additionally took related actions earlier this week.
Some states have gone farther than concentrating on TikTok. New Jersey and Wisconsin for instance additionally banned distributors, services from different Chinese language corporations together with Huawei Applied sciences, Hikvision (002415.SZ), Tencent Holdings (0700.HK) – the proprietor of WeChat, ZTE Corp (000063.SZ) in addition to Russian-based Kaspersky Lab.
TikTok mentioned it was “upset that so many states are leaping on the political bandwagon to enact insurance policies that can do nothing to advance cybersecurity of their states and are based mostly on unfounded falsehoods about TikTok.”
Many of the states thus far to behave have Republican governors, however Wisconsin, North Carolina and Kentucky all have Democratic governors.
Calls to ban TikTok from authorities gadgets gained steam after U.S. FBI Director Christopher Wray mentioned in November it poses nationwide safety dangers.
Wray flagged the risk that the Chinese language authorities may harness the app to affect customers or management their gadgets.
For 3 years, TikTok – which has greater than 100 million customers – has been looking for to guarantee Washington that the private knowledge of U.S. residents can’t be accessed and its content material can’t be manipulated by China’s Communist Occasion or every other entity beneath Beijing’s affect.
Final month, President Joe Biden signed into regulation a authorities funding invoice that included a ban on federal workers from utilizing or downloading TikTok on government-owned gadgets.
The regulation provides the White Home Workplace of Administration and Price range (OMB) 60 days “to develop requirements and pointers for govt businesses requiring the removing” of TikTok from federal gadgets.
Reporting by David Shepardson, Enhancing by Franklin Paul and Diane Craft
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