Windsor will soon follow in the footsteps of governments across Canada and ban the social media app TikTok.
Last week, the federal government announced its ban over cybersecurity concerns.
With lightning speed, provinces followed suit. Ontario, the last of the provincial governments, disallowed it on government-owned devices on Thursday. It went the extra step and banned it from the personal phones of Progressive Conservative Caucus members too.
"If our federal government is taking steps, and other governments are taking steps to ban the use of that app on their networks, it makes us, at the City of Windsor, take a look at the cybersecurity risk," said Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens. "We will be banning TikTok from city devices, and that should be happening in relatively short order."
Windsor won't go the extra step of banning it from the personal phones of city workers.
"We can't do that on personal devices, but any city device or device that accesses our wifi, we can certainly control access," Dilkens said.
The ban would cover municipal devices distributed to all city workers, including police and Transit Windsor employees.
Dilkens also said the order would not require approval from city council.
"It's an administrative decision," he said.
Like London, Dilkens doesn't believe the City of Windsor has much use for the app anyway.
"I'm not aware of our communications department really using it," he explained. "Perhaps we have an account just as a function of testing it out, but it's not a place where you would see regular city information posted."
Dilkens isn't surprised by the speed with which governments issued the bans.
"You don't see the banning of apps by governments very often. So when it happens, especially when it happens at the federal level, it makes the provinces, it makes the territories, it makes the municipalities think what's going on here? Should we be doing the same? " he said.
London banned the app earlier this week, as did Hamilton, Waterloo, Ottawa, Calgary, and Gatineau.
