The City of Vancouver previously took two weeks to ban TikTok from its devices following federal ban
Vancouver city hall has not decided whether to remove WeChat from its devices, like it did after the federal and B.C. governments banned TikTok from their devices earlier this year.
The Communications Security Establishment’s 2023-2024 National Cyber Threat Assessment warned that WeChat “has been used to spread misinformation, disinformation and malinformation and propaganda specific to the Chinese diaspora.” “In early 2020, it was communicated by the office of the Chief Information Security Officer to all security leads across all government ministries that WeChat was not permitted on government-managed devices,” said a statement provided by public affairs officer Farah Tarannum.
The B.C. government’s WeChat account was originally registered for personal use by Bruce Ralston when he was minister of jobs, trade and technology in 2018, the same year that then-premier John Horgan led a trade mission to China. “It was five or six years ago the U.K. government gave the first official warning on this app. So it takes several years for the Canadian government to actually take some action.”The risk to users is threefold: privacy, security and trust. The app requests access to all files on a device, the camera and microphone, and nearby devices.
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