Governor Larry Hogan announced on Tuesday that Maryland will ban the use of TikTok and some other platforms with Chinese or Russian roots in the state’s executive arm of government. Maryland is now the most recent state to deal with the platforms’ cyber security issues.
According to the Republican governor, the platforms might be used for cyberespionage, government monitoring, and the improper acquisition of sensitive personal data. He, therefore, issued an emergency cybersecurity order that banned their usage.
Hogan stated that the cyber vulnerabilities that underpin their daily lives may pose the greatest threat to their personal safety and national security. They are releasing an emergency alert against foreign actors and groups that want to weaken and divide systems to further protect them.
The Maryland order comes a week after South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a Republican, banned state workers and contractors from using TikTok on state-owned devices because of its connection to China.
On Monday, South Carolina’s Republican Governor Henry McMaster asked the state’s Department of Administration to get rid of TikTok from all devices owned by the state. Pete Ricketts, Nebraska Governor disabled TikTok on government-owned devices in August 2020.
Additionally, the app is not allowed to be used on military smartphones according to the US armed forces.
Holden Triplett, a co-founder of Trenchcoat Advisors and a former FBI official who worked in Beijing and counterintelligence, said that most nations are beginning to realize that the danger is not worth taking.
Despite the fact that there has been much debate about whether the Chinese government actively collects data from TikTok, Triplett asserted that the application has a clear flaw.
ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, must accede to any potential requests from Chinese security and intelligence agencies for data handover because it is a Chinese company, he said. In 2020, ByteDance relocated its headquarters to Singapore.
According to a recent report from the NGO Global Witness and the Cybersecurity for Democracy team at New York University, TikTok has struggled to identify advertisements that contain false information about US elections.
But a spokesperson for TikTok, Jamal Brown, claimed that the worries regarding driving restrictions are mainly generated by misunderstandings about their company.
Brown added that they are always ready to meet with the state policymakers and discuss privacy and security practices. He continued by telling how disappointed they are to see many states banning TikToks where the people used it to build communities and connect with constituents. It makes them concerned that certain people will no longer have access to their platform.
Vanessa Pappas, the Chief Operating Officer of TikTok in Los Angeles, claims that the company protects all American users’ data and no one from the Chinese government has access to it.
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On Tuesday, Republican members of Wisconsin’s congress urged Democratic Governor Tony Evers to remove the video platform TikTok from all state-owned devices, branding it a threat to national security.
In a letter, US. Sen. Ron Johnson and US Reps. Scott Fitzgerald, Mike Gallagher, Tom Tiffany, Glenn Grothman, and Bryan Steil expressed their opinion that the Wisconsin residents expect their governor will keep them safe from TikTok’s dangerous national security dangers and use it as a channel for CCP intelligence operations.
Last month, Gallagher collaborated with Florida’s US. Sen.Marco Rubio in an opinion post asking about the government to ban on TikTok.
Britt Cudaback, a spokesperson for Evers, said the administration very seriously considers cybersecurity threats and frequently consults with counterintelligence experts, the FBI, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security when making decisions about state government devices.
In the place of the broad-based directives that previous President Donald Trump issued against Chinese online businesses, the White House under President Joe Biden has adopted a more targeted approach.
Officials from the United States and the corporation are currently negotiating a potential deal that would satisfy American security worries.
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