The European Parliament has ended up joining the other two major European institutions and has banned the use of TikTok on their devices by MEPs and employees.
The European Commission and the Council of the EU adopted this decision last week for their officials and five days later the European Parliament followed them.
The Chinese application has recently become a source of suspicion in the West for "data protection and data collection for third parties", as can be read in the message that the parliamentarians received late in the afternoon.
With their decision, the European institutions join the step already taken by the United States Congress at the beginning of January.
Then, the administrative heads of the North American legislature prohibited their employees from using the TikTok short video application, belonging to the Chinese group ByteDance.
Canada added this Monday to the list of governments that veto the use of this computer program on electronic devices used by their employees: “The decision to remove and block TikTok from public administration mobile devices is taken as a precaution, in particular due to concerns about the legal regime governing information collected from devices, and is in line with the approach of our international partners.
On a mobile device,
In the case of mobile phones, laptops and computer tablets of the European Parliament, the period given to its users to remove the application from the phone ends on March 20.
Devices that are still running TikTok that day will be blocked.
The decision of the institution chaired by the Maltese Roberta Metsola is more contained than that of the Commission or the Council, since in the case of personal electronic devices it recommends "firmly" that the Chinese application stop being used.
The other two institutions warned that if their use was combined with that of others at work, such as email, access to them would be blocked.
The war that Western countries have declared on TikTok took its first steps with Donald Trump in the White House.
In 2020, the Republican wanted to ban it throughout the country, although he ultimately did not.
The Administration of the Democrat Joseph R. Biden also has it in its sights.
The first step to put a stop to it was taken at the beginning of the year by Congress with a ban on downloading the app.
This same Tuesday, a spokesman for the Department of Commerce, Alan Estevez, has described it as a "threat".
With more than a billion users, according to ByteDance data, the social network is one of the most popular at the moment, especially among young people, who prefer it to Google for searching.
Its irruption and its success have caused other already established networks, such as Instagram, to launch features that are similar to TikTok's proposal: short videos selected by the algorithm.
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