ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control team, which conducts probes into potential misconduct of current and former employees, planned in two instances to collect TikTok data about the location of US citizens whom the company never employed, the report said on Thursday.
The report said it is unclear what information may have been collected by the Beijing-based team, but the plan apparently was to obtain location data from the US citizens’ devices.
The reviewed materials indicate that the ByteDance team planned on using location information from TikTok to surveil US citizens, although the exact nature and purpose of the surveillance was not disclosed to protect sources, the report said.
The TikTok app is able to collect approximate location data for marketing, legal compliance and other purposes, company spokesperson Maureen Shanahan was quoted as saying in the report.
Shanahan said user data is kept safe by using security monitoring, with access approval overseen by personnel in the United States. Employees are only granted access to US data on an as-needed basis, Shanahan added.
TikTok and ByteDance did not respond to questions about whether the Internal Audit team targeted any US government officials, activists, journalists, or public figures, according to the report.