Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, has signed an executive order prohibiting government employees, agencies and contractors from downloading and using TikTok on state-owned devices.US officials have been raising security concerns about TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, over the past few years over the belief that the Chinese government is using it to gather data.A couple of Republican Senators also introduced a bill in the same year that would ban all government employees from using TikTok on work-issued smartphones.More recently, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr asked Apple and Google to remove the app from their stores after a BuzzFeed News report came out that China-based ByteDance employees repeatedly accessed US users' private information.TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew assured Republican Senators in a letter after the report came out that the company is working with Oracle to protect the data of its users in the US "with robust, independent oversight.""