TikTok has refuted an allegation that a ByteDance team based in China intended to use the software to track the movements of American people.
On Twitter, the social media behemoth stated that it has never been used to “attack” the American government, activists, public figures, or journalists.
The company also claims that it does not gather precise location information from U.S. users.
It was responding to a Forbes story that user data had been accessed without their knowledge or consent.
The US business journal, citing documents it had seen, said that ByteDance had initiated a monitoring project to probe staff wrongdoing.
It was stated that the Beijing-based team had aimed to collect location information from an American individual at least twice.
According to the study, it is unclear whether data on American residents was ever obtained, although there was a plan to capture location data from US user devices.
The TikTok PR team stated in a series of tweets that the story lacked “rigor and journalistic integrity.”
TikTok stated, “Forbes opted not to publish the piece of our statement that refuted the plausibility of its central allegation: TikTok does not collect accurate GPS location information from US users, thus it could not monitor US users in the manner claimed by the story.”
Forbes stated, “We are confident in our sources and stand by our story.”
Privacy issues
Authorities from throughout the world have begun to scrutinize app makers, particularly regarding the data of military and intelligence employees.
Concerned that user data could be shared with the Chinese government, a US national security council ordered ByteDance to sell TikTok’s American operations in 2020.
In June of this year, TikTok relocated the data of its U.S. customers to the servers of Oracle, headquartered in Austin, to address certain regulatory concerns.
In the United Kingdom, TikTok faces a £27 million ($30 million) penalty for failing to protect the privacy of youngsters using the platform.
The Information Commissioner’s Office of the United Kingdom determined last month that the video-sharing network may have processed the data of minors without proper authorization.
The watchdog reported that the violation spanned more than two years – through July 2020 – but had not yet resolved.
Tiktok has contested the results and stated that they are “provisional.”
TikTok is the fastest-growing social media app in the world, with over 3.9 billion downloads.
Since its inception in 2017, it has generated more than $6.2 billion (£5.5 billion) in gross revenue through in-app spending, according to the analytics firm Sensor Tower.
