‘TikTok appears to remain—despite the claims of its U.S. executives—beholden to its China-based leadership,’ Democratic senator Mark Warner tweeted.
TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company planned to track the personal locations of specific American citizens, according to a new bombshell Forbes report, drawing a sharp rebuke from a senior Democratic senator.
The team at ByteDance planned to collect the location data of one American using the app in at least two cases, the report found, citing internal TikTok and ByteDance materials. The outlet could not confirm whether ByteDance was able to follow through with the plan.
Although a TikTok spokesperson gave Forbes a statement about how TikTok employs users’ location data to “help show relevant content and ads to users, comply with applicable law, and detect and prevent fraud and inauthentic behavior,” the report specified that the materials it obtained showed that ByteDance specifically intended to “surveil individual American citizens.”
Conspicuously, representatives for TikTok and ByteDance did not answer Forbes’s questions about whether the ByteDance team singled out U.S. officials, activists, public figures, or journalists.
The bombshell report is already making waves in Washington, where one key Democratic lawmaker condemned TikTok’s behavior and accused it of dishonesty.
“TikTok appears to remain—despite the claims of its U.S. executives—beholden to its China-based leadership,” Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Mark Warner tweeted this evening. “With each new report, there’s further evidence that TikTok’s claimed ‘independence’ is illusory.” In the wake of revelations this summer that ByteDance engineers in China accessed U.S. users’ data, Warner accused TikTok’s lobbying team of “misrepresenting” the company’s practices to congressional committees.
ByteDance spends millions of dollars annually on its Washington-based lobbying efforts — staffed by former staff members for high-profile Republican and Democratic lawmakers.
The Biden administration is currently reviewing the data-security risks posed by TikTok’s ties to China and is considering an agreement by which the company could partner with U.S. software provider Oracle as a “trusted technology partner.”
The Forbes report noted that the ByteDance team in question regularly accessed data about TikTok’s U.S. team from China to investigate potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees, but that the Americans it planned to surveil had never had an employment relationship with the company.
ByteDance hosts an internal Chinese Communist Party committee, where company employees study party doctrine. In addition, one of the firm’s board members is affiliated with the party’s united-front influence networks.