TikTok said that it does not collect accurate information about the geographical location of its users in the United States, which means that it cannot be used to monitor people, as stated by Forbes.
In a series of tweets, Forbes accused the platform of violating a vital part of its pledge, which states that “TikTok does not collect accurate geo-location information from US users.”
The site stated that the team behind the monitoring project is part of the internal audit and risk control department at ByteDance, the owner of the TikTok platform.
The article, which was published earlier on Thursday, said the internal audit team – usually tasked with monitoring those who currently work for the company or who have worked for the company in the past – planned to monitor at least two Americans who “had no business relationship with the company.”
Forbes says its report was based on material it has seen, but it did not include details about who might have been tracked or why ByteDance planned to track them, claiming that doing so could put its sources at risk.
TikTok responded to Forbes’ reports of its involvement in tracking US citizens by saying, “The Forbes report lacks accuracy and has chosen not to include part of our statement that disproved its primary claim that TikTok does not collect accurate geo-location information from US users, which means that TikTok cannot monitor US users in the way the article suggested.”
TikTok says the app has “never been used” to target “anyone in those groups and it does not change its in-app actions to track those people”.
The Chinese company says the audit team “follows set policies and processes to obtain the information they need to conduct internal investigations.”
The company adds that anyone caught doing what Forbes claimed in the article will be fired.
TikTok has made promises in the past to US authorities and lawmakers in an effort to allay their fears that China might use the app against US citizens.
Last June, TikTok announced that it had changed the default storage location of user data in the United States to Oracle’s cloud servers located in the United States.
The security of TikTok data has been a widespread concern for years, especially for US lawmakers concerned about the Chinese government’s access to data on US citizens.
The CEO of TikTok wrote a letter to Republican critics at the time about how the company planned to keep US user data separate from ByteDance.
