The University of Wisconsin System will limit TikTok on system-owned devices, according to UW System Director of Media Relations Mark Pitsch.
“UW System will be restricting the TikTok application on System-owned devices,” Pitsch said in an email statement to The Badger Herald.
According to Wisconsin Public Radio, Pitsch did not detail how these limitations will function across all 13 universities that are part of the UW System or when they would be enforced.
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UW’s previous TikToks have all been removed, though the account does still exist.
Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers decided earlier this month in Executive Order #184 to ban TikTok from state-owned devices. Evers’ decision followed President Biden’s decision to ban the app from federally-owned devices and a letter from Republican state congressmen that urged Evers to delete his TikTok account and ban it from official devices.
The letter referenced fears that TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, helps keep the Chinese Communist Party informed by providing them with users’ data.
According to WISN, Evers worked with the FBI to determine whether banning TikTok was necessary and ultimately decided it was.
UW Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor Dietram Scheufele said while the data TikTok tracks is not unusual for other apps on our phones, privacy concerns are realistic considering the app’s ownership.
“Most of the apps on our phone do the same thing TikTok does and take much more data than they really need, it’s just that the data is owned by what a lot of people see as a hostile country,” Scheufele said. “It’s not an unrealistic constraint.”
United States Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced his plan to introduce a bill that would ban TikTok across the nation after Congress passed a bill he sponsored to ban TikTok from government devices.
In a tweet, Hawley said the app threatens mental health and privacy and that he will be introducing legislation to ban it.
“[TikTok] is China’s backdoor into Americans’ lives,” Hawley wrote. “It threatens our children’s privacy as well as their mental health.”
