TikTok’s Parent Company In China Planned To Use Platform To Track Locations Of Specific Americans: Report

TikTok’s parent company in China reportedly planned to use the platform to track the location of specific American citizens.

The team that was going to track American citizens was ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control department, according to a report in Forbes. The person who oversees that department is Beijing-based executive Song Ye, who reports to ByteDance co-founder and CEO Rubo Liang.

The team is supposed to investigate alleged misconduct by current and former employees, but has allegedly in multiple instances “planned to collect TikTok data about the location of a U.S. citizen who had never had an employment relationship with the company,” the report said, citing documents that Forbes viewed.

It’s not clear whether the team collected the location and data of the targeted individuals, the report said, adding that the intended use of the data was to “surveil individual American citizens, not to target ads or any of these other purposes.” – READ MORE