Because of their level of security deemed insufficient, social networks, streaming services and mobile games are now officially prohibited on the professional smartphones of French civil servants.
The ubiquity of data collection in daily life is cause for legitimate fear. AT each time we use applications, we must agree to blindly trust companies so that they do not exploit the potential of these real gold mines while ensuring their security. And when political tensions get involved, things get complicated. Jean-Noël Barrot, the Minister Delegate for the Digital Transition and Telecommunications, has published a new measure applying to the 2.5 million state civil servants in France. Thus, recreational applications are now prohibited on the professional smartphones of civil servants. If the list of applications in question has not yet been decided, the Minister of Transformation and the Public Service Stanislas Guérini revealed to France info that three main categories are concerned. These are social networks (Instagram, Twitter, TikTok…), streaming services (Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video…) and mobile games (Candy Crush for example). France is thus following in the footsteps of several Western institutions and governments, which have already banned or limited the use of the Chinese social network on professional devices – its possible use by Beijing for intelligence purposes worries – but goes a step further. .
Recreational applications: not on civil servants’ professional smartphones
Stanislas Guerini explains in his press release that recreational applications “do not have sufficient levels of cybersecurity and data protection to be deployed on administrative equipment”because they can “constitute a risk to the protection of the data of these administrations and their public officials”. Therefore, this measure takes effect immediately. To continue to use a so-called “recreational” application, agents will have to apply for an exemption from the digital department of their ministry, in particular “for professional needs such as the institutional communication of an administration.”
By adopting this measure, France is following in the footsteps of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium and the European Commission which, as a precaution, have banned TikTok from the function phones of State agents and members of their government, while pushing it further – it prohibits recreational applications of all origins, including Americans. This decision is adopted in a particular context since TiktTok is currently under fire from critics and could well be banned throughout the United States. Indeed, for many years, the successful social network has been suspected of transferring the personal data of American and European users to its parent company ByteDance, raising fears of interference from the Chinese government.
TikTok: fears of interference from governments
Although ByteDance strongly denies that the data can be collected by Chinese authorities, the company is indeed a member of the China Federation of Companies and the Internet. However, as specified in the statutes of this organization, each member company undertakes to follow “the way of Xi Jinping” – the current president of China – while agreeing to be supervised by the Chinese administration of the cyberspace – the Chinese institution in charge of the monitoring and the censorship of the Web. On March 23, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was auditioned by the US Congress and ended up confessing to lawmakers that personal data was still being accessed by some employees in China – something he had already revealed in November 2022 (see our article). Suffice to say that they didn’t really like it…
If the United States bans TikTok, other countries could follow suit. In France, the Senate recently opened an investigation to assess the dangers of the social network’s algorithm, with the mission of discovering “if these differences in operation have the purpose or effect of serving a strategy to harm foreign users of TikTok, the cohesion or the security of foreign States”. Senators are particularly concerned about a feature that allows employees to “push” a video via a button to make it go viral, fearing it could be used to push political messages.