U.S. House Staff Banned From Using TikTok Following Location Tracking Controversy
The U.S. House of Representatives has reportedly banned its staff from downloading, installing and using TikTok on their mobile phones.
The U.S. House of Representatives has reportedly banned its staff from downloading, installing and using TikTok onto issued mobile phones. The development comes days after TikTok parent company ByteDance admitted to its staff tracking the physical movement of Financial Times, Forbes, and BuzzFeed journalists.
According to an internal memo sent by the House chief administrative officer Catherine L. Szpindor on Tuesday, obtained by NBC News, House staff cannot download TikTok on any devices issued by the lower house of the U.S. Congress.
As of last week, TikTok was also banned, at least partially, by 19 out of the 50 U.S. states. The latest comes on the heels of reports that some TikTok staff peeked into journalists’ movements by looking at their IP addresses to zero in on the source of the leak of confidential information from within the company.
TikTok chief internal auditor Chris Lepitak, who led the team responsible for snooping on journalists, and four others who accessed the sensitive data have been fired, while Song Ye, TikTok’s China-based executive to whom Lepitak reported, has resigned.
Nevertheless, that hasn’t deterred an internal House report to designate the short-form video sharing and social media platform as “high risk due to a number of security issues.”
“House staff are NOT allowed to download the TikTok app on any House mobile devices,” the memo reads. “If you have the TikTok app on your House mobile device, you will be contacted to remove it.”
The TikTok ban is expected to become more extensive pending president Biden’s signing of the ~$1.7 trillion omnibus bill that includes legislation banning TikTok from all federal devices.
TikTok’s associations with the CCP-run Chinese government have forced legislators to face the uncomfortable reality, now confirmed by ByteDance, that the personal information of U.S. citizens can be used to the country’s detriment in disinformation campaigns. There are fears that China could indirectly influence or censor app content or spy on Americans.
See More: The National Security Threat of Digital ‘Open Borders’
Earlier in December 2022, when Texas joined other states in banning TikTok from government-issued devices, the state’s governor Greg Abbott said, “TikTok harvests vast amounts of data from its users’ devices – including when, where, and how they conduct internet activity – and offers this trove of potentially sensitive information to the Chinese government.”
He added, “While TikTok has claimed that it stores U.S. data within the U.S., the company admitted in a letter to Congress that China-based employees can have access to U.S. data.” Almost 100 million of TikTok’s 1.53 billion users are from the U.S.
TikTok is working with the U.S. government to assuage concerns about national security threats. The company told multiple agencies, “We’re disappointed that Congress has moved to ban TikTok on government devices — a political gesture that will do nothing to advance national security interests — rather than encouraging the Administration to conclude its national security review.”
However, lawmakers aren’t too happy with that. In a November 2022 Washington Post piece, republicans Marco Rubio (FL) and Mike Gallagher (WI) criticized Biden for “encouraging greater engagement with the platform” and striking a deal with the company which would legitimize TikTok’s continued operations in the country without any change in ownership.
“This would dangerously compromise national security and provide a template for other CCP-controlled companies to establish themselves in the United States with minimal scrutiny. Unless TikTok and its algorithm can be separated from Beijing, the app’s use in the United States will continue to jeopardize our country’s safety and pave the way for a Chinese-influenced tech landscape here,” Rubio and Gallagher added.
The duo have introduced the Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act (ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act) to ban the platform altogether in the U.S.
FBI director Chris Wray has previously called TikTok a “Trojan Horse for the Chinese Communist Party.”
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