Canberra: Australia has become the last of the “Five Eyes” security partners to ban the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok from its federal government’s devices.
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said in a statement on Tuesday that based on intelligence and security agencies’ advice, that ban would come into effect “as soon as practicable”.
The so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partners -- the United States, Canada, Britain and New Zealand -- have taken similar steps.
TikTok objected to the decision.
“We are extremely disappointed by this decision, which, in our view, is driven by politics, not by fact,” the company’s general manager for Australia, Lee Hunter, said in a statement. “Again, we stress that there is no evidence to suggest that TikTok is in any way a security risk to Australians and should not be treated differently to other social media platforms.”
He urged the Australian government to treat all businesses fairly, “regardless of country of origin.”
Western governments are worried that TikTok poses risks to cybersecurity and data privacy, and that the app could be used to promote pro-Beijing narratives and misinformation.
TikTok is owned by the Chinese technology company Bytedance and has long maintained that it does not share data with the Chinese government. It is carrying out a project to store US user data on Oracle servers.