The cybersecurity war between the West and China deals another blow as the EU Commission decides to ban TikTok on business devices.
The European Commission follows the steps of the United States government, banning the Chinese social media app TikTok from staff’s devices. The latest development in the cybersecurity conflict between China and the West, and surely not the last.
TikTok is a video-based social media company owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance. It was the first social network outside the Meta umbrella to reach three billion users, and is currently the world’s most popular social media.
The fear of the United States and the European Union is that Chinese firms, and therefore the Chinese government, accesses sensitive users’ data. Though TikTok has local servers in Europe, where all the continent’s data is redirected to, they admitted that some Chinese-based staff can still access it.
The new policy will be enforced effective immediately. The European Commission staff, roughly 32,000 employees, will have to uninstall TikTok from business as well as personal devices.
Failing to comply will result in the impossibility of accessing work applications like Skype Business.
A similar policy has been introduced, as we said, in the United States last year. However, they are not alone: the Dutch and the British governments have also introduced measures to protect their employees’ data. Though in neither case a mandatory regulation was issued, they strongly suggested their staff to delete the app from their phones.
A cyber world war
Last January, TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew was in Brussels trying to mend relationships with the European Union. Chew tried to showcase the security and data safety of TikTok, but that was not enough to convince the Commission.
Indeed, China as a whole has gained a terrible reputation in the West. There have been many instances of Chinese cyberattacks against the West. Often, Chinese hackers created a flock of fake accounts on Western social media with the sole purpose of spreading anti-west propaganda.
Such attacks have been reported by both Meta and Twitter, always resulting in the cancellation of thousands of fake accounts.
China is also a safe haven for North Korean hackers, which operate under Beijing’s jurisdiction to be less easily spotted.
When today’s ban was issued by the European Union, a TikTok spokesperson said the company was “disappointed with this decision, which we believe to be misguided and based on fundamental misconceptions”.
In the interconnected globalization of the XXI century, cybersecurity is just another pawn on the geopolitical chessboard. And, much like in the game of chess, a pawn could be promoted to a powerful queen if the opponent is not careful.
