TikTok is seen as a potential security risk to U.S. national security, so it is banned and now soldiers must remove the app from service phones.
U.S. Army has banned its soldiers from using the Chinese TikTok video app on their service smartphones. As the US magazine Military.com learned, the app from the Beijing-based company ByteDance has now been officially classified as a security threat. “It is considered a cyber threat,” said Lieutenant Colonel Robin Ochoa, spokeswoman for the US Army. “We don’t allow it on government phones.”
By the end of October, US Army used the TikTok app as an instrument to recruit new soldiers. Then US Senators Tom Cotton (Arkansas) and Chuck Summer (District of New York) demanded an intelligence investigation to what extent TikTok should be classified as a national security risk for the USA.
Recently the ratings for TikTok reversed by US DoD
In mid-December, U.S. Department of Defense’s TikTok rating reversed. The Pentagon advised its employees in a December 16 cyber-alert notice that TikTok should no longer be used on service phones because the app has “potential security risks”. However, no details are given.
U.S. Department of Defense guidelines indicate that you should watch which apps are loaded on a business cell phone because they could spy on communications and data. That’s why such applications should be deleted immediately and TikTok uninstalled.
In addition to the US Army, the US Navy is said to have adopted the Department of Defense’s guidelines to ban TikTok from service phones, according to Gizmodo . It is still unclear how the handling of TikTok is handled by other sub-armed forces such as the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Air Force.
The ban applies only to official mobile phones, private soldiers’ phones are excluded. Bytedance denies that the TikTok app is spying on the communication and data of its users.
