The New Zealand Government has no plans to follow Australia in investigating measures to curb Tiktok’s data-harvesting, but Andrew Little, the minister responsible for intelligence services, has warned users here to be cautious.

Australia’s Home Affairs Minister, Clare O’Neil​, has asked her department to investigate how Australia could respond to the data practices of Tiktok and social media apps based in China.

“The fact that we’ve got millions of Australians accessing an app where the usage of their data is questionable is very much a modern security challenge ... no country in the world has found the easy solution to managing this,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald, in an interview published Sunday.

Little – who met O’Neil in Canberra on Monday evening – said he expected to discuss Tiktok with the minister. But the Government had no plans to similarly investigate Tiktok and other such apps, and was not working on the issue beyond trying to make people aware of the risks.

“We’ve been saying for a while that people using particular apps, particularly where they're uploading data and stuff, need to know that always puts the security and privacy of data at risk,” he said, in an interview before his meeting with O’Neil.

“Tiktok's no different, and we know it gets routed through China, and that poses additional risks ... because of the obligations that Chinese corporates have to co-operate with their intelligence agencies.

“Well, not just to co-operate, but in fact to comply with their demands of disclosure of information.”

Tiktok, a video-based social media platform owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, has become hugely popular, with 1 billion users across the globe and, reportedly, 1 million in New Zealand.

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But the app’s popularity has sparked concerns about the extent of user data gathered and how it could be used. Buzzfeed in June reported evidence of China-based staff having access to the app's US data.

Last month, MPs in New Zealand were warned by the Speaker that Tiktok should not be used on Parliamentary Service devices as “your devices could be accessed by ByteDance (the owner of TikTok) and the Chinese Government”.

The White House has also launched a review of the national security risks posed by Tiktok and WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, after deciding against pursuing former President Donald Trump's attempt to ban both apps.

Tiktok was among nearly 60 Chinese apps banned in India 2020, a move the government said was taken to protect citizen's data, but also appeared a retaliation to a clash at the country’s border with China.

A ban of the app is off the table in Australia. O'Neil said while there no “silver bullet” to the problem, users may need greater protection from the government.

”People know that their data is not being well protected and they’re still continuing to use the app,” she said.

Little was in Canberra on Monday for the first stop in his 10-day tour of New Zealand’s Five Eyes partners. He said any ban or measures to curb such apps posed an issue to “significant freedom of expression and freedom of speech interests”.

"It's not about stopping people doing stuff, because some people derive enormous enjoyment out of this. But people just need to be aware that the data that gets uploaded, could turn up anywhere ... at any time.”

Adam Boileau​​, a security expert from CyberCX, said Chinese authorities’ access to Tiktok’s data was just one of the concerns presented by the app.

Another issue was the app’s access to a phone’s microphone, address book, and possibly the keyboard when you browse the Internet inside the app. He said it would only take an update to the app's software to make such capabilities “do something else”.

“You know, Tiktok’s real popular in Taiwan. But you can imagine if China decides to roll into Taiwan, they could easily push out an update to make the installed app do something that it didn't previously.”

Boileau said there was also the potential it could be used for foreign interference operations – using data of a country's users in a campaign to “shape conversations or discourse”, such as Russia had attempted through other platforms in the US and Europe.

New Zealand was too small a market for Tiktok to influence how the app operates, and would likely end up “following the coat tails of the EU or Australia”, he said.

“There's nothing really much more to be done about it, and you know, all of the other social media companies have similar sets of concerns. It's just we kind of, for better or worse, trust Facebook and Google and so on more than we trust China, which is not unreasonable.”