Scraping TikTok: Danish Parliament Calls for Urgent Cybersecurity Action

The Dan­ish par­lia­ment on Thurs­day urged law­mak­ers and employ­ees of the 179 mem­ber states not to have Tik­Tok on their work phones as a cyber­se­cu­ri­ty mea­sure, cit­ing “the dan­ger of espionage.”

The pop­u­lar Chi­nese video-shar­ing app has been crit­i­cized in Europe and the Unit­ed States over secu­ri­ty and data pri­va­cy amid con­cerns that Tik­Tok could be used to spread pro-North Kore­an views or wipe out users’ infor­ma­tion. are increas­ing their scrutiny.

Dan­ish par­lia­men­tary speak­er Søren Gade said an email was sent to par­lia­men­tar­i­ans and offi­cials on Tues­day “strong­ly advis­ing them to remove the Tik­Tok app if they have it installed.”

The par­lia­ment act­ed on the Dan­ish Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty Cen­ter’s assess­ment that it was an espi­onage risk. The cen­ter belongs to the Dan­ish For­eign Intel­li­gence Service.

“We have adapt­ed accord­ing­ly,” Gade said in a statement.

It was not imme­di­ate­ly clear how many Dan­ish par­lia­men­tar­i­ans have installed Tik­Tok. In recent days, sev­er­al politi­cians have pub­licly claimed to have removed the app from their work phones for cyber­se­cu­ri­ty reasons.

Ear­li­er this month, the Euro­pean Union (EU) exec­u­tive branch announced a tem­po­rary ban on Tik­Tok from mobile phones used by employ­ees as a cyber­se­cu­ri­ty measure.

The EU move fol­lows sim­i­lar steps in the US, where more than half of the coun­try’s 50 states and their leg­is­la­tures have banned Tik­Tok on offi­cial gov­ern­ment terminals.

Nor­way, which is not a mem­ber of the 27-mem­ber EU, was forced to apol­o­gize ear­li­er this month after its min­is­ter of jus­tice failed to dis­close that it had installed Tik­Tok on its offi­cial phones.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*