TikTok fires back at Forbes, TikTok is strongly pushing back against a Forbes report alleging that its parent company wanted to use the video app to “monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens.”
In a series of tweets, TikTok accused Forbes of leaving off a vital part of its statement, which says that “TikTok does not collect precise GPS location information from US users,” despite the article’s claims that its parent company ByteDance considered obtaining “location data from U.S. users’ devices. TikTok fires back at Forbes, ” Forbes’ article says that TikTok and ByteDance didn’t answer questions about whether the internal audit team had ever targeted US politicians, activists, public figures, or journalists and compared the alleged plan to Uber’s “greyball” program that targeted specific users, in some cases serving regulators a misleading version of the app.
In its thread, TikTok says the app has “never been used to ‘target’” anyone in those groups and that it doesn’t change the in-app experience for those people. (It’s worth noting that’s not an absolute denial of any consideration for specific targeting or that a request was ever made TikTok’s only saying its app has not been used for that purpose.) The company says that the audit team “follows set policies and processes to acquire information they need to conduct internal investigations.” it also claims that anyone caught doing what Forbes alleged in the article would be fired. TikTok fires back at Forbes, The security of TikTok data has been a broadly cited concern about the platform for years, especially for US lawmakers concerned about the Chinese government’s access to data about US citizens. After a June report from BuzzFeed News alleged that US user data had been accessed from China, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew wrote a letter to Republican critics addressing how the company planned to keep American user data separate from ByteDance.
Source: This news is originally published by theverge