I remember when I was issued a laptop by some organization that I worked for. I realized that it was not my property and I wouldn't have treated it as such. I have never been one to really participate in social media a great deal and aside from videos that I have seen that were put somewhere else, I have never participated in TikTok nor have I had it installed on any device that I have had in my possession.
From what I have seen of TikTok though it appears to be a self-promoting tool of the tools and if you want to do it, then great, but you shouldn't really be wasting this time on the property of your employer, government or not.
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I don't know if it is 100% true or not because it doesn't really affect me, but I remember Joe Rogan reading the Terms of Service or EULA of TikTok and what he was reading was a privacy nightmare. The amount of data that you had to give to the app in order to use it was pretty outrageous and certainly not something that people would for the most part, be ok with giving up. Someone once said that "if you are using a product and that product is "free"... that is because you are the product." or something along those lines.
For me, it isn't just a question of the phone or device potentially being compromised in a security aspect but also a question of productivity. If someone has some sort of social media app on their "work device" then it would always be suspect to me that they are wasting time that they are meant to be contributing to some sort of job.
I'll never forget those cringe AF videos that the nurses all across America were uploading where they had coordinated dance routines that must have taken quite some time to come up with and choreograph, while at the same time everyone was complaining about how hospitals were overwhelmed. They weren't so overwhelmed that they couldn't dedicate a couple of hours to seeing up a dance routine now were they?
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These were likely the person's personal phone because as far as I know, nurses and medical workers don't usually get phones issued by their employer because why would they need them?
I haven't really gone down the rabbit hole of whether or not TikTok is an arm of the Chinese government the way that a lot of people and politicians have and to some degree I do believe that this is all politically motivated just like almost everything else is these days.
For me it is just a stupid app that a person shouldn't be using on company time. I know that on my own job sites that if I saw my construction crew all working on a dance routine instead of building what we were there to build, I would definitely have a problem with this. I'm no slave driver, my staff are very happy in their jobs and I have excellent employee retention rates. I would draw the line at my entire crew taking a break from their jobs in order to do something stupid like work on a dance routine.
Basically I operate like this: If it isn't directly related to the job and you wouldn't stay after hours to do it while not being paid, then you shouldn't be doing it while I am paying you and certainly not with equipment that I provided for you. The same extends to the government, even though generally speaking I don't particularly care for the government in North Carolina or anywhere else.
So I guess I applaud this move. Now let's extend this ban to all other non-work-related apps that are on company/government - issued devices as well.
I know we used to check how much time employees spent on non work related sites like FBook and it was mind boggling. I do understand the Government banning certain sites as this I don't think is a made up rumour about the Chinese.
for me it is difficult to really understand why anyone would want to spend so much time on FB but I would imagine in a large office environment there is a lot of productivity lost because of social media. Even if they blocked it in the network people would just switch over to their phones. I don't feel like offices should be slave-drivers but people need to do something while they are there.
I'm happy that I work in construction. If anyone FB's at all on the job I'm not aware of it. It's hard to update your status when you are operating a nail gun on a rooftop.