No solid announcements have been made around how the TikTok ban may be enforced in the US. Especially now that there's a new President in the White House.
On September 20, Trump's commerce secretary Wilbur Ross told Fox Business News why the measures have now been enforced: “At the president’s direction, we have taken significant action to combat China’s malicious collection of American citizens’ personal data, while promoting our national values, democratic rules-based norms, and aggressive enforcement of US laws and regulations,” Ross said in a prepared statement.įortunately, shortly afterwards Washington announced that a proposed deal between Oracle and Walmart to take a stake in TikTok would mean that the immediate removal from the App Store and Play Store was no longer necessary - meaning that a full ban now seems far less likely. The Trump administration fears that Chinese company ByteDance - which owns TikTok - may have deep associations with the ruling Communist Party in China and, as such, there is a risk that the personal data of millions of Americans could end up in the hands of the Chinese government. That could be a much more viable option to use together with a VPN, if the full-on TikTok ban takes effect in your country. Many of the most popular videos can be found via the TikTok website - either on your computer or your phone. That said, you don't have to use the dedicated app to enjoy watching TikTok videos.
So if the TikTok app becomes delisted where you are, it's likely that even using a VPN will be little help.
These two measures can be applied separately or together." "Apps and websites as well can be blocked by ISPs.
NordVPN, one of the world's most popular providers, told us: "VPNs can allow US users to access TikTok, however, this depends on how the ban is enforced. If the app, for example, is illegal in the country - official app stores are forced to remove it and it gets much more difficult to download the app. However, VPNs can only help so far and may end up not being a silver-bullet solution to the issue.
View Deal How to change your phone's location with a VPN That's why VPNs for Netflix have become so popular (despite VPN use being against the service's Ts&Cs) - if you know that a Netflix catalog somewhere else in the world has a show or film you want to see, but it isn't being shown on Netflix in your home country, then utilising a server in the other country will have you watching in no time. This would effectively make your computer think it's in another country. So it's no surprise that VPN usage has surged since the US started mooting an outright TikTok ban.įor example, you could change location of your IP address to somewhere outside the territory in which it's banned. That's because they reroute all of your internet traffic via a secure server somewhere entirely different - that could be in your home country or somewhere else. The use of VPNs has become a commonplace way to 'spoof' the IP address of your laptop, smartphone, streaming device - even your router. TikTok may have been given a reprieve in the US, but the proposed TikTok ban there is a reality in other parts of the world - India and, now, Pakistan being the obvious places where the popular social media app is prohibited, preventing over 1.5 billion from accessing and sharing lip-syncing videos, viral dance routines and comedic stunts on their smartphones.īut the shape-shifting, geo-spoofing nature of virtual private networks - or VPN - could offer TikTok users a lifeline to ensure that they're not denied access to the latest videos from Charli D'Amelio, Addison Rae, Zach King, Loren Gray and the like.