It’s no secret we’re no fans of TikTok here at The Drill Down. Almost every week, a new security concern is raised that is either a threat to national security or a threat to the privacy of individual Americans —this story touches on the latter.
According to an extensive report from Forbes, TikTok parent ByteDance planned to use TikTok to monitor the physical location of specific American citizens. The project was assigned to a Beijing-led team and would access American data without user knowledge or consent.
The team responsible for the monitoring effort was ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control department, led by Beijing-based executive Song Ye.
“The team primarily conducts investigations into potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees,” Forbes reports. “But in at least two cases, the Internal Audit team also planned to collect TikTok data about the location of a U.S. citizen who had never had an employment relationship with the company, the materials show. It is unclear from the materials whether data about these Americans was actually collected; however, the plan was for a Beijing-based ByteDance team to obtain location data from U.S. users’ devices.”
This should concern every American —especially those that actually have this spyware on their phone (here’s your weekly reminder to delete it immediately if you do have it).
TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan did her best to spin the story, saying the company collects approximate location information based on IP addresses to “among other things, help show relevant content and ads to users, comply with applicable laws, and detect and prevent fraud and inauthentic behavior.”
According to Forbes, “TikTok is reportedly close to signing a contract with the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which evaluates the national security risks posed by companies of foreign ownership, and has been investigating whether the company’s Chinese ownership could enable the Chinese government to access personal information about U.S. TikTok users.”
But we already know that they can access information about U.S. TikTok users —why are we pretending we need an “evaluation?”
“Like most companies our size, we have an internal audit function responsible for objectively auditing and evaluating the company and our employees’ adherence to our codes of conduct,” said ByteDance spokesperson Jennifer Banks in a statement. “This team provides its recommendations to the leadership team.”
Does that make anyone feel better? That’s like China saying “trust us.”
