Social-Media
India banned TikTok, WeChat and other Applications originating in China
TiKTok, WeChat, and several dozen other devices originating in China, the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has barred them as "committed to ... Prejudicial to India 's sovereignty and integrity, "a press release reports. 59 apps are included in the prohibited list.
India is a giant TikTok market, owned by ByteDance, a Chinese firm. According to April data from SensorTower, 30% of the 2 billion downloads of TikTok came from India. Messaging App WeChat, owned by Tencent, China, has over 1 trillion users all over the world.
TikTok and WeChat did not answer Monday's comments requests immediately.
India hasn't outlawed TikTok for the first time. The government ordered Google and Apple last year to delete the app from their applications over pornography issues on the site. Indian lawmakers said TikTok promotes explicit content sharing and "economic destruction." After approximately one week, the ban was lifted.
There have been heavy tensions between China and India after an incident at the border that killed 20 Indian soldiers earlier this month. The importance of the geopolitical situation in India's decision to ban TikTok is not apparent.
In February 2019, TikTok fined 5,7 million dollars to the Federal Committee on Trade for charges of violations of COPPA, the children's privacy statute.
The platform is widely criticized for on-going safety issues. Children under 13 years of age have been permitted to register for the app without parental consent. After then the app has improved, parental controls have been increased.
Several US Government departments, such as the Security Administration of Transportation, the State Department, Homeland Security Service, the Navy and the Army, banned the usage of the software on government-issued devices in response to safety concerns regarding links to the Chinese government from ByteDance.
It's also uncertain whether the ban on TikTok in India is in some way associated with recent security concerns about the way the app handles clipboard content on certain devices.
Last week, iOS 14 users of a beta notice that the organization vowed to stop a practice several months earlier that TikTok was accessing content on its app clipboards.
TikTok said it was using "anti-spam" material from the clipboard, and added that it had sent a new update to the App Store since then.
