Hong Kong has banned WhatsApp, Google Drive, and WeChat calling them risky. This ban on messaging apps as well as Google's cloud storage platform has been imposed specifically on government employees and offices. Common users of Hong Kong will continue to use them. Earlier also, social media platforms have been banned on government officials and offices in many countries.

IT guidelines issued

According to the AP news agency, the Hong Kong government has issued an IT security guideline for civil servants, in which the use of these three apps has been banned. Let us tell you that the Hong Kong government has taken this decision due to the data breach that came to light at the beginning of the year. In the data breach, the personal data of thousands of people in the Hong Kong government department was leaked, which caused a lot of uproar.

According to the guidelines issued by Hong Kong's Digital Policy Office, government employees will not use apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, and Google Drive on their official phones, laptops, and PCs. However, to use these apps on personal phones, government employees will have to get approval from their reporting manager. This step taken by the Hong Kong government has been welcomed by many security researchers.

Hong Kong is not the first country where government employees have been banned from using social media apps. Earlier in the US, many Chinese apps including TikTok have been banned from being used by government employees.

Big security risk

The government says that government data exchanged on social media and cloud services reaches third-party vendors outside the government, which can be a security risk. Many such data shared among government officials are extremely confidential. In such a situation, this confidential information reaches the cloud server of WhatsApp or Google Drive. Given this risk, the Hong Kong government has banned the use of these apps by employees working in government departments.