Regina city employees lose TikTok on work devices

Coming on the heels of the provincial government’s decision to ban TikTok on government-owned phones, the City of Regina is following suit.

Regina city manager Niki Anderson announced a similar move during a media scrum Wednesday.

Anderson said city staff had not been formally notified yet, but the process would start within the next 24 hours.

“We’ve been monitoring how many and I think we’ve got about 1,650 cellphones and then of those, five per cent have TikTok,” she said.

Of those, she said only a small number have used TikTok even in the past day.

“But knowing that the province has done it, knowing that it’s been done federally and that there are some valid concerns around it, we will be removing it from employees’ cellphones,” she said.

The moves to ban TikTok on government devices at the federal, provincial and municipal levels comes in the wake of probes by federal and provincial officials as to whether or not the video-hosting app owned by ByteDance poses risks to privacy and security.