Parliamentarians will have to considerably limit the use of foreign applications such as TikTok, Telegram, Snapchat, Instagram or WhatsApp. At least, if they want to stick to cybersecurity best practices. In an email consulted by Tech&Co and mentioned on March 22 by the media politicalthe three quaestors of the National Assembly Éric Ciotti, Marie Guevenoux and Éric Woerth call on all elected officials to be “extremely vigilant” to the exchange of confidential information on foreign requests.
No work phones
“Declared as used for commercial purposes and customer profiling, all your data is in the hands of the companies responsible for these applications. These companies depend on an extraterritorial right to Europe that is to a large extent to the detriment of French users and this data can, in particular, be donated for the benefit of foreign intelligence services”, they explain in the letter of March 20.
As Marie Guévenoux mentioned to Tech&Co in early March, this warning is directly related to the many debates surrounding the use of the TikTok app, some of the data of which could be used by the Chinese government for espionage purposes. Information that is even more sensitive when it is linked to the deputies, who are now very present on social networks.
“Given the particular risks to which the exercise of their mandate exposes deputies who use these applications, we would like to ask them to be extremely vigilant and recommend that they limit their use,” warns the National Assembly, which recommends using the French Wimi application. for your exchanges.
Still at Tech & Co, Marie Guévenoux recalled that deputies have the freedom to use their smartphone as they see fit, not having a professional mobile dedicated to their mandate.
Globally, many Western countries – as well as the European Commission – prohibit their elected officials or officials from using the TikTok application, a subsidiary of the ByteDance group, which refuses to end the transfer of data from its European users to China. .
Source: BFM TV
