The French government has announced plans to ban recreational apps, including TikTok, Netflix, Instagram, Candy Crush and Twitter, from officials’ devices.
The move which will be monitored by The National Cybersecurity Agency of France (ANSII) is expected to affect around 2.5 million government officials.
Civil Service Minister, Stanislas Guerini stated that recreational applications do not provide sufficient levels of cybersecurity and data protection to be deployed on administration’s digital tools. These applications may therefore constitute a risk to the data protection of these administrations and their public officials.
At the same time, the minister clarified that exceptions to the rule might be put in place for “institutional communications” purposes.
The decision comes amid several governments worldwide banning TikTok from government devices. However, it is not specified when these apps would be removed from government devices.
Mostly, recreational apps gather information from user devices and some can use bandwidth, take up storage space or inadvertently cross-post information.
The French government’s decision to ban TikTok from government devices comes two months after France fined the social media company €5m ($5.4m) for failing to provide users with enough information on the purpose of cookies on its site.
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