(Yellowknife) Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon join most provinces that now ban TikTok on government devices, pending a federal threat assessment.
The ban went into effect Friday in the Northwest Territories and Tuesday in Nunavut. A ban has also been in effect since last week in the Yukon.
Ottawa announced on February 27 that it was banning TikTok from all government-owned devices, following a review of the social media platform by Canada’s Chief Information Officer. Catherine Luelo determined that the app posed an unacceptable level of privacy and security risk.
Nine out of ten provinces have since followed suit; Ontario is considering doing so.
Privacy authorities in Canada, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta announced a joint investigation on February 23 to determine whether TikTok is complying with Canadian privacy laws.
The Chinese government owns a stake in TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and Chinese laws allow Beijing to demand access to data from users of the platform.
ByteDance ensures that it does not share data with the Chinese government and that its data is not stored in this country.
Federal, provincial and territorial officials have said there is no evidence that government data has been compromised through the use of TikTok.
