Amid national security concerns about the social media app TikTok, Pennsylvania Treasury Secretary Stacy Garrity announced Thursday that it has banned the use of TikTok on Treasury Department-owned phones and computers.
This comes as Congress considers a similar ban, and possibly a nationwide ban, of video sharing apps on all federal devices. The state of Indiana has taken steps to ban the app in some or all, and the state of Indiana has filed two lawsuits against TikTok related to false claims it makes about its content and protection of information collected from TikTok. I am filing a lawsuit. user.
Government officials say the app, owned by Beijing, China-based ByteDance, is dangerous because it could put sensitive data such as location information, personal habits and American interests into the hands of the Chinese government. It claims to pose a security risk.
“The Treasury Department’s computer network is targeted by fraudsters and criminals every day,” Garrity said in a statement. “TikTok poses obvious dangers due to its collection of personal data and its close ties to the Chinese Communist Party government. It’s an important step in our ongoing effort to secure other critical and sensitive information entrusted to the Treasury Department.”
She said an internal security review conducted this month found the app was not used on Treasury-issued devices. In addition to banning its use on Treasury-owned devices, she said the Treasury Department’s firewall has been updated to prohibit access to that app and her corresponding website.
The Treasury Department is the latest government agency to ban or restrict access to TikTok.
State court spokeswoman Stacey Witalek said the app has been banned from court-owned devices for three or four years. It has a policy and TikTok is not one of the platforms it uses to communicate with Pennsylvanians, said General Accounting Office spokeswoman April Hutchison.
Attorney General’s Office spokeswoman Jacklyn Rose said office policy prohibits employees from using state-issued devices to access social media for personal use. Employees, she said, “have a duty to ensure that state-issued equipment is used for its authorized purposes.”
For state agencies operating under the governor’s jurisdiction, Dan Egan, a spokesman for the governor’s office of administration, currently approves media advertising platforms for federal business or on behalf of the federal government. It said that creating or using a TikTok account to do so is prohibited. .
FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee last month and warned of the security threats the app poses. It said it could force ByteDance to share data and infiltrate and compromise app users’ devices.
Meanwhile, TikTok denies sharing data with Chinese government officials, but members of Congress are skeptical and are making moves to limit or ban its use.
Provisions in a sweeping spending bill, which Congress is considering this week, would ban TikTok on all federal devices. Banned, according to the Pew Research Center, the app is the second most popular app among American teens after YouTube.
* This post has been updated to include a statement from Dan Egan, spokesman for the Governor’s Administration.
To contact Jan Murphy: [email protected]Follow @JanMurphy on Twitter.
