REPORT: TikTok owner planned to use app to track individual American citizens’ locations

ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based parent company, had plans to use their app to monitor the personal location of specific American citizens, according to a bombshell report.

The team behind the monitoring project is ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk control department, which primarily conducts internal investigations on employee misconduct. But according to documents obtained by Forbes, the team also planned to collect the location data of U.S. citizens never employed by the company in at least two cases.

A TikTok spokesperson said that the app collects approximate location data based on user 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."

But the documents Forbes reviewed showed that the internal ByteDance team was planning to use this location information to “surveil individual American citizens, not to target ads or any of these other purposes.”

“Forbes is not disclosing the nature and purpose of the planned surveillance referenced in the materials in order to protect sources,” said the report.

The internal audit team also has been ordered to investigate employees even after leaving the company, according to the documents.

Some America-based tech companies have reportedly used their apps to track individual users, such as a 2017 New York Times report that Uber tracked individual politicians and regulators and served them a different, misleading version of their app. Uber and Facebook are also accused of tracking journalists reporting on their apps, claims neither company has directly responded to.

But Forbes said the difference those and ByteDance’s plans is that the Chinese company had recently testified to U.S. lawmakers that access to sensitive U.S. user data will be “limited only to authorized personnel, pursuant protocols being developed with the U.S. government.”

TikTok was a high-profile target of former President Donald Trump’s campaign against China. His executive orders banning the app were ultimately blocked by federal court rulings and undone by the Biden administration.

ByteDance has promised to rebuild its internal systems to keep “protected” identifying user data on U.S. users within the country, where it cannot be accessed by China-based employees – an effort known as Project Texas.

Forbes reported in August that TikTok’s in-app browser can track your keystrokes.

TikTok acknowledged that the reported tracking features exist but that it is not using them.