CANBERRA, Australia — Australia is the last of the “Five Eyes” security partners to ban the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok from its federal government’s devices.

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said in a statement on Tuesday that the ban would go into effect “as soon as it is possible to do so.” This was based on advice from intelligence and security agencies.

The United States, Canada, Britain, and New Zealand, which are all part of a group called “Five Eyes” that shares information, have all done similar things.

TikTok didn’t agree with the choice.

Australia is the last of the “Five Eyes” security partners to ban the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok from its federal government’s devices.

Lee Hunter, the company’s general manager for Australia, said in a statement, “We are very upset by this decision, which we think is based on politics and not on facts.” “Again, we want to stress that there is no evidence that TikTok poses a security risk to Australians and that it shouldn’t be treated any differently than other social media sites.”
He asked the Australian government to be fair to all businesses, “no matter where they come from.”

Western governments are worried that TikTok offers risks to cybersecurity and data privacy, and that the app could be used to spread pro-Beijing propaganda and false information.

Bytedance, a Chinese tech company, owns TikTok. The company has said for a long time that it does not share data with the Chinese government. It is working on a project to store data about U.S. users on Oracle computers, which it says will keep China from getting to the data.

People have said that the company gets more information about its users than other social media companies, but the company has said that this is not true and that it is run independently by its own management.

The main institutions of the 27-country bloc, the European Parliament, the European Commission, and the EU Council, have also banned TikTok on devices used by their staff. Under the ban, which went into place last month, lawmakers and staff were also told to delete the TikTok app from their own phones and computers.
India banned TikTok and dozens of other Chinese apps, like the chat app WeChat, across the whole country in 2020 because of privacy and security concerns. Shortly before the ban, a fight between Indian and Chinese troops at a disputed border in the Himalayas killed 20 Indian soldiers and hurt dozens more.

At the beginning of March, the U.S. gave government departments 30 days to remove TikTok from all devices and systems used by the government. The ban only applies to devices used by the government, but some U.S. politicians want to ban all devices.

China has criticised the U.S. for banning TikTok, saying that it is a waste of state power and hurts companies from other countries.

More than half of the 50 states in the U.S., as well as Congress and the U.S. military, have banned the app from government devices.

Info Sources- abcNews, The Guardian, Reuters, CNN