“It’s like a Trojan horse for China.”
Majority of parties in the Dutch House of Representatives shuffles the possibility of banning the use of the TikTok app on the mobile devices of government officialsappealing to the need to be cautious with the Chinese matrix platform.
The four parties that make up the coalition government in the Netherlands have expressed concern about the app, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, asserting that the app’s data protection is not sufficient and that it is therefore possible that users’ information could be seen by the Chinese government.as reported by the Netherlands Broadcasting Corporation (NOS).
In December, Tiktok made a change in its privacy policy, which gave Chinese employees access to European user data.although it is not clear exactly what data these employees have access to and which employees are involved.
Minister of Digitalization and member of the Democrats 66 party, Hind Dekker Abdulaziz, has warned of a “potentially high security risk“. “Let’s be cautious and ban TikTok on civil servants’ work devices. We are talking about some 140,000 civil servants working for the government,” he justified.
The political formation Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), in the voice of MP Evert Jan Slootweg, has urged the House of Representatives to follow the example of the United States. “We must not be naive and follow the path of the U.S. government,” he asked, according to the media.
In the same line, the Popular Party for Freedom and Democracy, which has announced that they are already conducting studies on the dangers of the application.
Christian Union, on the other hand, has called for a complete ban on the application in the country. “If it’s not good enough for public servants, will itWhy should it be good enough for our children??”, argued MP Nico Drost.
The proposal comes months after the U.S. Senate pushed through legislation to ban TikTok on government devices, after lawmakers said they feared the data, collected by the company, could be transmitted to the Chinese government.
“TikTok is a Trojan horse for the Chinese Communist Party. It is a major security risk for the United States, and until it is forced to completely sever ties with China, has no place in government devices.“, Republican Senator Josh Hawley indicated at the time.
However, from the Dutch Ministry of Digitization they have been reluctant to “simply” follow the US ban, stating that. they expect to study the application and make a decision of their own in the coming weeks.
