Push to ban TikTok from Australian government staff devices amid spy fears

Social media app TikTok should be banned from Australian government staff devices, an expert warns. See why.

The Australian government needs to follow the United States lead and purge Chinese social media giant TikTok from its workers’ devices amid mounting unease over the app’s ability to harvest personal data.

Former parliamentary committee on intelligence and security chair Senator James Paterson said he had been pursuing the Albanese government to dump TikTok from all government departments for the past eight months.

“I first wrote to TikTok in July last year to ask whether or not Australian user data was accessible in mainland China and they eventually conceded that it was, and I shared that correspondence with the Minister Home Affairs and Cyber Security Clare O’Neil and to urgently act on that but eight months later they’ve taken no action at all,” the now Opposition spokesman for cyber security and foreign espionage Senator Paterson said.

Senator James Paterson near his home in Melbourne. Picture: Aaron Francis

The White House has given all US federal agencies 30 days to “remove and disallow installations” on all employees’ devices to prevent internet traffic through the app, following a similar move by the European Union and Canada.

The ordered app purge is currently limited to government workers but a bill being debated by a House select committee overnight is seeking to give US President Joe Biden power to ban the video-sharing app more broadly.

“We could have led the world on TikTok just as we did with Huawei, being the first country to ban it from our 5G network, and others followed our lead but we are now falling behind not just from our closest ally, the US, but Canada, European Union and others to protect at least their government users,” the senator said.

He said the “smoking gun evidence” came last year when TikTok employees in China were busted for using the app to conduct surveillance on a Forbes journalist who had been writing critical articles about them, in a bid to identify her sources.

A TikTok billboard bemoaning political moves to ban the app. Picture: Supplied

The move in the US and elsewhere came amid fears the TikTok app owned by Chinese firm ByteDance had more default permissions to intrusively harvest data and posed an unacceptable level of risk of the data being used for espionage by China to advance its interests.

The Australian government said it had not received any intelligence and security advice about taking a similar US approach to TikTok, which has more than three million users in Australia.

“We’ll take the advice of our national security agencies, that hasn’t been the advice to date,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers said on Wednesday.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers at Parliament House in Canberra, flanked by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

His comment came despite the Department of Parliamentary Services warning MPs, senators and their staff earlier this month about installing apps and citing TikTok for potential security vulnerabilities.

The Home Affairs and Defence last year also banned staff from uploading TikTok on their respective department-issued mobiles and tablets on the basis of an unknown “high risk” to national security.

A spokesman for Ms O’Neil said the government was contacting a review on social media platforms. He dismissed Sentaor Pateron’s remarks about inaction, declaring it was his previous government being “asleep at the wheel” and neglecting cybersecurity that the Labor Government was now trying to fix.

TikTok Australia has previously stated all Australian user data was securely stored in Singapore and the US, and not sent to China, and was a safe social media outlet.

Originally published as Push to ban TikTok from Australian government staff devices amid spy fears