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The United States, Canada, the European commission and the United Kingdom have all advised government officials to uninstall and ban the Chinese owned TikTok app – is there a real threat behind this app or is it all part of a geopolitical game blown out of proportion?

More than a billion people use TikTok, including around one in four in the UK and more than 150 million across Europe. Any suggestion that they’re at risk by keeping the app on their phones would therefore be hugely damaging to its reputation. A similar ban by India in June 2020 due to geopolitical reasons wiped 200 million users off its total user base in an instant.

But as of yet no country that has banned TikTok from government devices has taken the further step of advising ordinary members of the public to uninstall it.

As much as TikTok likes to downplay its links to China – even to the extent of saying its parent company, ByteDance, is based in the Cayman Islands tax haven rather than Beijing – there is an indubitable connection that can’t be ignored. The app was born in China, and even if it’s now increasingly localized, that connection is something it can’t shake, according to cybernews.com.

TikTok has denied ever being demanded to hand over user data to the Chinese government and continues to declare that it will be deny any requests.

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