TikTok has found itself in the line of fire quite a bit in the past week or two, and now Amazon is forcing its employees to remove the app from company-owned devices.
In an email that was obtained by multiple news outlets, Amazon is saying that “due to security risks, the TikTok app is no longer permitted on mobile devices that access Amazon email.” The email goes on to state that “If you have TikTok on you device, you must remove it by 10-Jul to retain mobile access to Amazon email. At this time, using tikTok from your Amazon laptop browser is allowed.”
The US is also thinking about banning TikTok
This comes after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in an interview with Fox News, that the administration is strongly looking at banning TikTok. Though, the administration has not yet followed through, it’s really only a matter of time.
It’s also unclear how the administration would go about banning the app. However, in India, the government resorted to banning any IP address from connecting to TikTok servers.
This comes after India banned it, and several other Chinese apps, following the escalation at the border. And it also comes after a few security flaws were found in the TikTok app. A new feature in iOS 14 exposed how TikTok was accessing user clipboard data when it was running in the background. Which could expose passwords and other sensitive data.
TikTok did fix that relatively quickly, but that’s still a privacy scare for an app that is installed on millions of Americans devices.
TikTok has all of a sudden found itself in the hot seat
TikTok has, somewhat quietly, taken over the world. Becoming one of the most popular social media apps worldwide. With its biggest following being in India. When the Indian government banned the app last week, some analysts said that TikTok is going to lose around $6 billion, just from being banned in a single country.
Now that the US is looking to ban the app as well, that revenue is really going to take a dip. India was TikTok’s biggest market, by a long shot. Followed by China and the US.
But why is TikTok being targeted? Well, TikTok is a Chinese-made app. And as we all know, China loves to harvest data and store it on servers in its own country. This isn’t new, and for a while it didn’t seem to bug most of us. But with China encroaching on the Indian border, India had to react. And for the US, President Trump has been going after China for quite some time. Banning some of its biggest companies – Huawei and ZTE. So it was only a matter of time before TikTok got banned too.