The NDP reactivated its TikTok account earlier this year, ignoring warnings that the app poses major security and privacy threats, as well as it being banned from all government-issued phones.
The NDP argues that it made the necessary security measures to safely insulate itself from such breaches from TikTok a platform that Public Safety Canada said poses high levels of risk to the security and privacy of Canadians.
The Chinese social media app is a video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based Internet technology company that was founded in 2012.
“The decision to remove and block TikTok from government mobile devices is being taken as a precaution, particularly given concerns about the legal regime that governs the information collected from mobile devices, and is in line with the approach of our international partners,” reads a statement from Public Safety Canada from July 2023.
“On a mobile device, TikTok’s data collection methods provide considerable access to the contents of the phone.”
Most parties ceased using the platform following the federal government’s ban last year after TikTok was found to be harvesting data in a way that could lead to future cyber attacks.
During her testimony before the public inquiry on foreign interference into Canada’s electoral process, NDP national director Lucy Watson said she didn’t know that the NDP was using TikTok again.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh had been a prolific user of the app, often as a means to connect with the younger voting block.
Around eight million Canadians use the app, of which 75% are under the age of 25, making it an incredibly valuable avenue to reach young voters but the app is currently under a national security review, ordered by the Trudeau government last fall.
“The very fact that I didn’t know that we had reactivated our TikTok account is reflective of my non-use of TikTok,” said Watson, who went on to tell the inquiry that her party consulted with cyber security experts before reactivating the account.
The NDP did not respond to True North’s request for comment but Watson said that the TikTok app is being used on a phone solely for that intended purpose and that it has its location features disabled.
“We’ve been assured that that will guard against the possibility of foreign interference,” said Watson.
However, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service released a top secret briefing note to the public, revealing that the agency had warned politicians that TikTok was vulnerable to exploitation by the Chinese communist government in December 2022.
“An internal company document from ByteDance ’s Internal Audit and Risk Control Department confirms that data stored on servers located outside of China is also possibly retained on China-based servers,” reads the CSIS briefing note.
“Mobile apps, like TikTok, can easily circumvent permissions that are otherwise designed to protect users’ data and the device ’s system resources,” it continued. “This breach presents an opportunity for an actor to persistently gain unauthorized access, exfiltrate sensitive personal information and control the device’s systems. Several security vulnerabilities in TikTok have been publicly reported from 2019 to 2022.”
TikTok did not respond to True North’s request for comment.
Both the Conservative party and the Liberal party do not have official TikTok accounts.