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Llano County is the first local government to ban TikTok from its devices to comply with a new Texas law. Senate Bill 1893 went into effect on June 14. It prohibits the use of the popular social media app on government-owned or leased phones and other devices. City and county governments have until Aug. 13 to pass their own policies.

The federal government declared the Chinese company-owned app a cybersecurity risk and banned it from employee devices in February. Texas passed its own ban that same month.

Llano County approved its policy on Monday, July 24, during the Commissioners Court’s regular meeting.

“This is a policy that will eliminate people using county-owned property (with TikTok installed),” Precinct 2 Commissioner Linda Raschke said during the meeting.

The cities of Marble Falls and Burnet are in the process of creating their own policies to satisfy SB 1893.

“Our policy is under development,” Marble Falls Assistant City Manager Russell Sander told DailyTrib.com. “The city does not have official TikTok pages and the ban does not appear it will have an adverse effect on our operations.”

Burnet City Manager David Vaughn had a similar response.

“We have not adopted a policy yet but will very soon,” he said. “We do not allow employees to use social media on city devices unless it is directly related to their work.”

According to Raschke, the policy could be used in the future to implement further restrictions, such as county employees not being able to connect to county-owned WiFi with their personal devices if the app is installed.

TikTok, owned by ByteDance Ltd., announced that it had over 150 million users in the United States in March. The app allows people to create, view, and share videos that can be accessed by all other users.

The app is considered a threat mainly because of its unknown potential for harvesting data from its users and the possibility of spreading misinformation to Americans. Age, location, time, internet browsing history, photos stored on a device, and notes taken on a device could all potentially be accessed by TikTok’s developers.

Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and many other social media platforms collect similar data, but TikTok differs from the American-owned companies in that it is based in China, a point of concern for U.S. officials.

“If you consider one-third of the adult population receives their news from this app, one-sixth of our children are saying they’re constantly on this app, if you consider that there’s 150 million people every single day that are obviously touching this app, this provides a foreign nation a platform for information operations, a platform for surveillance, and a concern we have with regards to who controls that data,” U.S. Army Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, commander of U.S. Cyber Command, director of the National Security Agency, and chief of the Central Security Service, said in a media release issued by the U.S. Department of Defense in April.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott echoed the federal government’s concerns in February.

“The security risks associated with the use of TikTok on devices used to conduct the important business of our state must not be underestimated or ignored,” he said. “Owned by a Chinese company that employs Chinese Communist Party members, TikTok harvests significant amounts of data from a user’s device, including details about a user’s internet activity.”

dakota@thepicayune.com