The popular video application, Tiktok, is installed on the phones of young people around the world. Forbes magazine caused a stir around the app when it published an article claiming that parent company ByteDance planned to use the app to track “the personal location of some specific US citizens”.
In response, the app wrote tonight (between Thursday and Friday) on its Twitter page that it “does not collect accurate GPS location information from US users, which means it cannot be used to monitor people ‘in the way Forbes suggested’.”
Forbes reported that the team behind the monitoring project is part of ByteDance’s internal audit and risk control department, a division that is typically responsible for investigating misconduct by current and former company employees. The release said that on at least two separate occasions, the parent company planned to use TikTok to collect data on the location of a US citizen who had never been employed by the company.
TikTok accused Forbes of omitting the part in a statement saying it does not collect accurate GPS location. This part “disproved the feasibility of the main claim”, the company explained. In addition, she emphasized that it has never been used to monitor members of the US government, public figures, activists, and journalists, and that the software does not serve them content that is different from other users. In the publication in Forbes, it is stated that the TikTok company “did not answer questions” about whether the internal audit team On ByteDance, specifically target people in those groups.
1/ @Forbes‘ reporting about TikTok continues to lack both rigor and journalistic integrity. https://t.co/HYF16KezqS
— TikTokComms (@TikTokComms) October 20, 2022
As Forbes noted, TikTok has previously made promises to US authorities and lawmakers in an effort to allay concerns that China could use the app against US citizens. In June, the company announced that it had “changed the default location of user data storage in the US” to “Oracle cloud servers located in the United States”. The company made the announcement just as Buzzfeed news reported that ByteDance employees in China were repeatedly accessing non-public data about TikTok users in the US, a report based on internal meetings leaked to the publication.
A few weeks later, TikTok detailed its plans for how to ensure the security of US users’ data in a letter sent to lawmakers. TikTok’s CEO promised that the company would “delete US users’ protected data from its systems and fully migrate to Oracle’s cloud servers located in the US.” B. Forbes spoke with an Oracle spokesperson who said that while TikTok now uses its cloud services, Oracle has no insight into what it is doing, and that the company still has full control over all of its data.