TikTok ban: New York City gives staff 30 days to remove Chinese app from work devices to ‘keep data safe’

“As part of these ongoing efforts, NYC Cyber Command determined that the TikTok application posed a security threat to the city’s technical networks and directed its removal from city-owned devices,” it said.

The updated biographies for the TikTok accounts of the city mayor, the Department of Sanitation and the Department of Parks and Recreation said the city administration would no longer monitor those handles from August.

Adams has just over 11,000 followers but the city’s sanitation department has nearly 50,000 users following its fun and informative video clips.

The state, however, will continue to allow select platforms for NY.gov, I Love NY and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to use TikTok for public outreach and marketing.

New York state prohibited the use and new downloads of the short-video sharing platform on government-issued devices in 2020.

“While social media is great at connecting New Yorkers with one another and the city, we have to ensure we are always using these platforms in a secure manner,” American tech news outlet The Verge quoted a New York City Hall spokesperson as saying on Wednesday.

In the US, 33 states governed by both Republicans and Democrats, have varying restrictions on TikTok use on government-issued devices.

In May, Montana became the first state to prohibit TikTok from operating in the state and blocks app stores from allowing users in Montana to download it. The state’s Republican governor Greg Gianforte described the policy as “the most decisive action of any state to protect Montanans’ private data and sensitive personal information from being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party”.

Scheduled to go into effect on January 1, the measure faces a legal challenge after TikTok sued the state arguing that the ban “unconstitutionally” shuts down “the forum for speech for all speakers on the app”.

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for the platform said in December that the company was “disappointed” so many states were “jumping on the bandwagon to enact policies based on unfounded, politically charged falsehoods”.

“It’s a private company,” he said. “Sixty per cent of the company is owned by global institutional investors, 20 per cent is owned by the founder and 20 per cent owned by employees around the world. ByteDance’s five board members – three of them are American.”

He said the company was headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore, had 7,000 US employees and had worked for the past two years towards building a “firewall” to protect users’ data.