Earlier this week, TikTok slammed a Forbes report alleging that its parent company wanted to use the video app to “monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens.”
In a series of tweets, TikTok accused Forbes of leaving off a vital part of its statement, which says that “TikTok does not collect precise GPS location information from US users,” despite the article’s claims that its parent company ByteDance considered obtaining “location data from U.S. users’ devices.”
Source: ILLUSTRATION BY STEPHANIE JONES FOR FORBES
The Forbes article released on Tuesday suggested that ByteDance’s Internal Audit team planned on surveilling at least two Americans who “had never had an employment relationship with the company.” Forbes says its report was based on materials it reviewed but did not include details about who was potentially going to be tracked or why ByteDance was planning on tracking them, claiming that doing so may put its sources at risk.
In response, TikTok said the app has “never been used to ‘target’” anyone in those groups and that it doesn’t change the in-app experience for those people. The company said that the audit team “follows set policies and processes to acquire information they need to conduct internal investigations.”
It also claimed that anyone caught doing what Forbes alleged in the article would be fired.
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