British government ministers have been banned from using Chinese-owned social media app TikTok on their work phones and devices on security grounds.
The government fears sensitive data held on official phones could be accessed by the Chinese government.
Cabinet Minister Oliver Dowden said the ban was a “precautionary” move but would come into effect immediately.
TikTok has strongly denied allegations that it hands users’ data to the Chinese government.
Theo Bertram, the app’s vice-president of government relations and public policy in Europe, told the BBC it believed the decision was based on “more on geopolitics than anything else”.
“We asked to be judged not on the fears that people have, but on the facts,” he added.
Mr Dowden said he would not advise the public against using TikTok, but they should always “consider each social media platform’s data policies before downloading and using them”.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had been under pressure from senior MPs to follow the US and the European Union in barring the video-sharing app from official government devices.
But government departments – and individual ministers – have embraced TikTok as a way of getting their message out to younger people.
Use of the app has exploded in recent years, with 3.5 billion downloads worldwide.
Its success comes from how easy it is to record short videos with music and fun filters, but also from its algorithm which is good at serving up videos which appeal to individual users.
It is able to do this because it gathers a lot of information on users – including their age, location, device and even their…
