A Chinese team from ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, planned to use the TikTok app to track the personal location of some US citizens, it reveals. Forbes.
The team behind the surveillance project primarily conducts investigations into possible misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees. But in at least two cases, the team planned to collect data from TikTok about the location of a US citizen who has never had a working relationship with the company.
It is unclear whether data was actually collected on these Americans; however, the plan was for a Beijing-based ByteDance team orb had device location data from US users.
TikTok spokeswoman Maureen Shanahan said that TikTok collects approximate location information based on users’ IP addresses to “among other things, help deliver relevant content and advertisements to users, comply with applicable laws, and detect and prevent fraud and inauthentic behavior.”
But material reviewed by Forbes indicates that the ByteDance team planned to use this location information to monitor individual US citizensnot to target ads or for any of these other purposes.
Forbes does not disclose the nature and purpose of surveillance mentioned in the materials to protect its sources.
ByteDance is not the first tech giant to consider using an app to monitor certain US users. In 2017, the New York Times reported that Uber had targeted various local politicians and regulators and served them a separate, misleading version of the Uber app to avoid regulatory penalties.
At the time, Uber acknowledged running the program, called “greyball,” but said it was used to deny ride requests to “opponents who conspire with officers in secret maneuvers aimed at catching drivers”among other groups.