Irish government employees told to remove TikTok app from work devices

DUBLIN (Reuters) – The state body responsible for advising the Irish government on cybersecurity recommended on Friday that employees of government departments and agencies should not use Chinese video app TikTok on work devices.

Many Western countries, including the UK, the US and other European Union member states, have banned TikTok over security concerns. The EU’s two largest political institutions also banned the app last month.

TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has been under scrutiny from governments and regulators over concerns that the Chinese government could use its app to collect user data or promote its own interests.

The head of Ireland’s National Cyber ​​Security Centre said TikTok was “the most advanced, if not the largest, entity in terms of the amount of user data it collects” and that this posed a risk given the nature of China’s intelligence gathering laws.

“The issue here is not what we know is happening. The issue here is what we cannot rule out,” NCSC director Richard Browne told national broadcaster RTE.

“When the risk exists in that context, it puts us in a position where the logical argument is that we take a sensible risk-based approach and ensure that government data cannot be compromised in that way.”

The NCSC said there was no reason politicians could not use the app on their own devices, and that it could only be used on work devices in exceptional cases where there was a business need, such as by the press office.

TikTok runs a number of its European operations from Dublin, including privacy and data protection. Last month, it announced it would open a second data centre in Ireland and reduce data transfers outside the EU.

(Reporting by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Andrea Ricci)