A cybersecurity report released last week caused shockwaves after it revealed the app can track users' screen taps when they visit other sites through TikTok.

Australia should consider banning TikTok if the government can’t be confident the Chinese company isn’t mining users’ data, a senior politician has claimed.

A cybersecurity report released last week caused shockwaves after it revealed the app can track users’ screen taps when they visit other sites through TikTok.

The video sharing platform runs code that enables it to observe the entry of text input, like credit card details and passwords, during ‘in-app browsing’.

Liberal senator and opposition cyber security spokesperson James Paterson said an outright ban on the app should be up for discussion.

Mr Paterson also serves on the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security – which examines foreign interference threats – and said increasing tensions with China required the issue be addressed urgently.

‘A ban should be on the table… we don’t want to wake up in a conflict scenario and think we need to protect our cyber security,’ he told The Oz.

Katherine Manstead, Director of Cyber Intelligence at Australian security firm CyberCX, told the publication the Chinese Communist Party had ‘an insatiable appetite for the personal information of Australian citizens’.

More than a 2.5million Australians regularly use TikTok – owned by Chinese company ByteDance – that allows users to upload short videos and watch other user’s videos fed to them using an algorithm.

About a third of Australian users are under 15.

Uri Gal, a business systems professor at the University of Sydney, said that TikTok has an ‘added level of espionage and national security that doesn’t exist with US organisations’.

He said restrictions against Chinese technology were not unprecedented, citing the previous Turnbull government’s ban on Huawei being involved in Australia’s upgrade to a 5G network.

Back in June, US Federal Communications Commission leader Brendan Carr called TikTok a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ after leaked internal audio from 80 TikTok meetings revealed employees accessed US user’s private data as recently as January 2022.

That was before last week’s bombshell security report highlighting the extent of TikTok’s data gathering capability.

Software engineer Felix Krause reported his findings after analysing the JavaScript code social media apps run when a user opens a website link within them.

For the code to work and keystrokes tracked, the user needs opens a third-party site within TikTok, as opposed to another browser like Safari or Google Chrome.

He tweeted: ‘When opening a website from within the TikTok iOS app, they inject code that can observe every keyboard input (which may include credit card details, passwords or other sensitive information).

‘TikTok also has code to observe all taps, like clicking on any buttons or links.’