The leading news is that the US state of Montana was the first to completely ban the use of the Tiktok application in its territory. The ban will be valid from January next year and will apply to installing the application. Those who are already using it will be able to continue using it, provided that they do not use the official phone of a state agency. A complete ban on the use of Tiktok on official phones is already in place.
Tiktok immediately countersued, alleging that the Montana ban denied its users a basic constitutional right to be informed. Montana is a state of barely a million people, and Tiktok claims that there are "hundreds of thousands of users" there, without specifying exactly how many of those hundreds there are.
The reason for the ban, as is well known, is the suspicion that Tiktok, whose founder is the Chinese company Byte Dance, collects user data from the West and sends it to servers in China, where various Chinese services then use it for who knows what purposes. Byte Dance constantly and unsuccessfully denies this. It didn't help them either at the beginning of April when they were fined 16 million dollars in Britain due to a court assessment that they did not protect the data of children using the application in a good way.
If it's any consolation, the penalty could have been a hundred times higher than what the court in Ireland handed down to Meta, the owners of Facebook and Instagram. Due to the violation of the GDPR, Meta will have to pay a fine of 1,2 billion euros, and they have been given five months to stop the transfer of data of European users to the USA, that is, to harmonize it with the European regulation.
The reason is the exposure of the data of EU citizens to the US intelligence services. Unlike Tiktok, where there are doubts about it, here there is evidence, and it was provided to the world by Edward Snowden, a former employee of the American security agency, who worked on the processing of that data. That fact gives a lot of fuel to those who point to double standards: the Chinese company is punished drastically, with a complete ban, just because of suspicion, and the American one is suspended and fined even though the misuse of data is proven.
At the end of April, the European Union announced the introduction of stricter rules primarily for large companies, namely those with more than 45 million monthly active users. Such firms were thought to be too big to control, but the EU now wants to prove that there will be no exceptions. All companies are required to make their operations transparent and commit to annual controls to determine whether they are working within the framework of European laws. Anyone who does not pass the inspection can be excluded from traffic in the EU, and this is being discussed very seriously. As much as it is unimaginable for many of us to wake up one day and discover that there are no Google or Meta apps on the app stores.
More precisely, it could happen that they are not there if you are in the EU, while they would still be accessible to users in Serbia if we were not fully aligned with EU regulations. There is little chance that something like that would happen, that we would not be aligned, but try to at least imagine a situation where young people from all over Europe come to Serbia to legally install Instagram or Tiktok on their new phone.
