He government of france has passed a law that prohibits the installation and use of entertainment appsamong which are TikTok, Instagram and Twitter, on the smartphones and tablets that you hand out to your employees. The law has been approved by Ministry of Transformation and Public Functionsand in the statement in which they announce it, the Minister Stanislas Guerini It has justified it by claiming that no entertainment app has strong enough security to be deployed on government-owned devices.
The minister has warned that the prohibited apps therefore represent a risk to the data stored by government agencies, and also by their employees. Of course, Guerini has ensured that there will be some exceptions to the use and installation of these applications, but only for apps that are needed to issue official communications, as can happen with Twitter. In those cases, the official who needs to use them for professional purposes will have to request permission to do so.
For now it is unknown when the law will enter into force, since the authorities have not offered any date for it. The specific name of the apps that will be prohibited has not been given either, although Guerini has indicated that the aforementioned apps are included in the ban, as well as Netflix or game apps, such as Candy Crush. The French Cybersecurity Agency will be in charge of monitoring and supervising compliance with the ban
The country is not the first to review the use of certain apps on the mobile devices of its governments, and even of some specific agencies. But if it is the first that prohibits the use of all leisure. In most of the remaining cases, the ban has been limited to TikTok.
The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the European Union, among others, have already banned TikTok on government smartphones, amid concerns by authorities that the Chinese government could force the network’s owner, ByteDance, to give up the data. you have about your users in other countries. Additionally, TikTok faces a full ban on US soil if ByteDance doesn’t sell it.
