Chinese Spyware Company (a.k.a. “TikTok”) Admits To Monitoring Physical Locations Of Americans
I always assumed the Chinese spyware company that masquerades as a social media app has already been tracking everything about everyone since its inception, but now I guess they’re kind of admitting it? Via Forbes:
A China-based team at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, planned to use the TikTok app to monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens, according to materials reviewed by Forbes.
The team behind the monitoring project — ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control department — is led by Beijing-based executive Song Ye, who reports to ByteDance cofounder and CEO Rubo Liang.
The team primarily conducts investigations into potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees. But in at least two cases, the Internal Audit team also planned to collect TikTok data about the location of a U.S. citizen who had never had an employment relationship with the company, the materials show. It is unclear from the materials whether data about these Americans was actually collected; however, the plan was for a Beijing-based ByteDance team to obtain location data from U.S. users’ devices.
TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan said that TikTok collects approximate location information based on users’ 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.”
[Forbes]
LMAO. I’m surprised the shill was brazen enough to slip in the “among other things.” Not that anyone cares enough to be paying attention, or has any idea what’s really going on.
