TikTok is essentially a military-grade program designed to harm the United States. They should not be accepted. More personal information about its users is collected by them than by virtually any other program. Forbes reported that the parent business intended to track specific American citizens’ personal locations using the TikTok app.
ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control department, which is in charge of the monitoring initiative, is run by Beijing-based executive Song Ye and answers to ByteDance co-founder and CEO Rubo Liang.
The team’s primary focus is looking into alleged wrongdoing by current and former ByteDance workers. However, the files reveal that in at least two instances, the Internal Audit team also intended to get TikTok information about the location of a US resident who had never had a working engagement with the company. According to the documents, it is unclear whether information about these Americans was ever gathered, but the idea was for a Beijing-based ByteDance team to collect location information from US users’ devices.
A deal between TikTok and the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which assesses the dangers to national security posed by businesses with foreign ownership, is apparently close to being finalized.
The question of whether Chinese ownership of the business would provide the Chinese government access to the personal information of US TikTok users has been investigated by CFIUS.
In September, Biden issued an executive order outlining the precise risks CFIUS should consider while evaluating foreign-owned businesses.
The directive intends to highlight the vulnerabilities that come with foreign adversaries having access to American citizens’ personal data for the purposes of surveilling, tracing, tracking, and targeting specific people or groups of people, with possible negative effects on national security.
It’s unclear what part ByteDance’s Internal Audit team will play in TikTok’s efforts to restrict access to US user data by personnel headquartered in China, especially in light of the team’s ambitions to track the movements of some US citizens using the TikTok app.
Even after ByteDance sets up a primary storage center in Singapore, a member of the team who was responsible for the company’s data claimed that it is impossible to prevent data that shouldn’t be stored in CN from being retained in CN-based servers. This was highlighted in a fraud risk assessment they produced in late 2021.
