The City of Regina has followed the federal and provincial governments in banning the use of the social media app TikTok on employee-issued cell phones.
“Knowing that the province has done it, knowing that it has been done federally and that there are some valid concerns around it, we will be removing it from employee cellphones,” said Regina’s City Manager Nikki Anderson.
She added that the ban would only affect a small number of employee-issued cell phones.
“I think we have about 1,650 cellphones, and of those, five per cent have TikTok, and of those, a small number have used TikTok recently.”
The move comes pending the results of a threat assessment by the federal government.
Provincial and federal privacy watchdogs recently announced an investigation into whether TikTok complies with Canadian privacy legislation.
The chief information officer of Canada reviewed the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform and determined it posed an “unacceptable” level of risk to privacy and security.
That led to the federal government and House of Commons banning the app from government-owned devices earlier this week.
The Chinese government has a stake in TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, and Chinese laws allow the country to demand access to user data.
The company that owns TikTok maintains that it does not share data with China’s government, and its data is not held in that country.
– with files from The Canadian Press
