First of all, what is the use of entertainment apps for government officials on their official phones and what other apps do they keep on them? Are pictures and videos taken privately with those phones? To be even more clear, is the person who owns a longer company car allowed to use it for private purposes, for shopping, evening outings, trips? Because essentially it's the same thing - a device is assigned to you, the bill (gasoline) is paid by someone else and the only reason you have social media on that phone is to use it for official purposes. Which some employees probably do, so the question arises as to how they will follow the events on Tik Tok in the future if we admit that it is not only a discussion with 15-second videos.
The reason for banning Tik Tok is primarily that it is a Chinese app. Because Tik Tok doesn't do much differently than, say, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, let alone Google. It collects data about your movement, the device you use, habits and interests in order to adjust its algorithm as best as possible and play you exactly the content that interests you. You correspond through it, it inserts "cookies" that help everything run smoothly, it keeps track of what you buy, what you pay for.
Of course, nobody likes that a foreign company, in China's case necessarily linked to the state, knows so much about the officials of his country. This data can be easily linked and we can assume that China, if it is interested, could learn a lot about interesting people, from where they go on vacation, to whether they like black women or blondes, boys or girls. The rest is routine.
But all this can be known by the American government through the American services that we all, for the most part, use, even though they convince us that everything is done legally and democratically on that side of the ocean and that there is no espionage. Unless, of course, state interests are involved.
It's not like we in Serbia can sit back and watch all this from the sidelines, since we also have a large number of social network applications, Gmail, WhatsApp, and Viber on our official phones. This last application is particularly interesting because it does not belong to the US or China and the owners claim that it completely safely passes the information exchanged by users, without the possibility of a third party having insight into them, which means that Viber administrators cannot see them either. It's good if it's true. In Serbia, as in several other countries, Viber is the primary means of communication, generally accepted during the pandemic as an application for connecting employees and exchanging business information. It has become so normal that in the current affair at the High Public Prosecutor's Office, the actors freely talk about the fact that they communicate about work through that application. Which means that it is not impossible that they also exchange confidential information, more precisely, it is very likely.
Perhaps it would be best if every administration in the world used its own application for sensitive communication, and that may not be very realistic because developing a secure application costs a lot. But it would certainly be good for government administrators (of computer networks) to check what is safe to use and then make such a recommendation to officials. It can also be in the form of an order.
