The Australian federal government Tuesday banned TikTok on government devices following advice from national intelligence agencies. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus announced that the viral media platform will be prohibited on devices issued by Commonwealth departments and agencies.
“After receiving advice from intelligence and security agencies, today I authorised the Secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department to issue a mandatory direction under the Protective Security Policy Framework to prohibit the TikTok app on devices issued by Commonwealth departments and agencies,” Dreyfus said.
The ban is mandated under Direction 001-2023 of the Protective Security Policy Framework, which states:
The TikTok application poses significant security and privacy risks to non-corporate Commonwealth entities arising from extensive collection of user data and exposure to extrajudicial directions from a foreign government that conflict with Australian law.
Under the ban, government entities must prevent TikTok from being installed and remove “existing instances” of the application on government devices. Exceptions will be considered if a “legitimate business reason” exists requiring the app to be used, and security mitigations will be applied.
Legitimate business reasons under the direction include a need to use the app to carry out regulatory functions, a work objective that requires using the app for research or communication, or marketing activity on the entities’ behalf to reach key audiences. The mitigations for an authorised exemption include ensuring the app is installed and accessed on a separate device without access to services containing classified information, minimising the sharing of personal identifying content on the app, and allowing only authorised users to access corporate TikTok accounts.
TikTok has faced international scrutiny following concerns that the application could pose national security risks and that data could be accessed by China through TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance, which is required to disclose user data—including browsing history, location, and biometric identifiers—to the Chinese government under national security laws. In December, an internal investigation revealed that four ByteDance employees had improperly obtained the data of US TikTok users, including two journalists, in order to identify leaks within the company.
Several governments have recently imposed internal bans on TikTok, including the United States, Canada, Wisconsin and North Carolina, and the European Commission.
