According to Friday’s announcement by Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, employees of the federal government of Belgium will no longer be permitted to use the Chinese-owned video app TikTok on their company phones.
De Croo claimed that the risks associated with the massive amounts of data gathered by TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, and the fact that the business is required to work with Chinese intelligence services, had been raised by the Belgian national security council.
“That is the reality,” the prime minister said in a statement.
“That’s why it is logical to forbid the use of TikTok on phones provided by the federal government. The safety of our information must prevail.”
TikTok in a statement said it was unhappy with a decision it said was based on “fundamentally wrong information”.
According to the company, it keeps customer data in Singapore and the United States and is constructing data centres in Europe.
“The Chinese government can’t force other sovereign nations to share data that is stored in their territory,” a spokesman for the company said.
Due to growing worries about the business and whether China’s government could use TikTok to collect user data or further its interests, the European Commission and the European Parliament last month banned the app from staff phones.
Beijing has consistently refuted any such plans.
De Croo encouraged other regional governments to adopt the same guidelines after the Flemish regional government of Belgium on Thursday announced it would limit access to TikTok on employee phones.
