Montana Governor Greg Gianforte has signed into law the most stringent restrictions on TikTok in the United States.

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The online service for creating and viewing short videos, which belongs to the Beijing-based company ByteDance, has been in a situation of gradual increase in pressure in the United States in recent months. Congress and state legislatures declare the need for stricter regulation of the functioning of this platform. But the actions of the governor of Montana maximize this regulatory attention in an active sense.

Gianfort, commenting on the regional law banning the online service, said that Montana is taking the most decisive action among all states to protect the confidential data of residents. The governor claims that the fact of the transfer of TikTok users’ personal information with the Chinese authorities is documented. At the same time, publicly available information about the application and the principles of its functioning does not confirm the authenticity of this statement.

At the same time, against the background of the lack of sound evidence of interaction TikTok with the Chinese government in the context of the transfer of personal data was precedent when the company admitted that employees tracked the location of journalists using information from an online service. This case is often mentioned during discussions about the privacy issue related to the operation of the application.

Montana lawmakers unveiled a bill to ban TikTok earlier this year. This initiative, which has already become an officially approved norm, provoked a large-scale emotional debate about other proposals to restrict the functioning of an online service in the United States. Banning TikTok on government devices and campus networks has already become a common practice.

The law, signed by the governor of Montana, aims to block the ability to download the platform in app stores for all users within the state.

Experts say that the technical feasibility of such measures raises questions. Many representatives of the expert community assume that Google and Apple will most likely not coordinate the functioning of their app stores following the requirements of regional laws. In their opinion, such a practice will cause a logistical nightmare when state legislatures begin to actively take local measures against apps.

TikTok users are likely to resist the process of implementing the ban methodology. The media reports that the company is already using a certain group of consumers dissatisfied with the regulation in order to challenge the law signed by the governor of Montana.

The implementation of the ban is a process consisting of many unknowns. Experts say that the Montana law is likely to face problems in court in the coming months.

As we have reported earlier, Amazon Launches TikTok-like Shopping Feed.