The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is accusing TikTok of sending personal data about American citizens to the Chinese Communist Party. The department filed a formal accusation, accusing the parent company, ByteDance of violating U.S. law.
The filing states, “This resulted in certain sensitive US person data being contained in Lark channels and, therefore, stored on Chinese servers and accessible to ByteDance employees located in China… Lark contained multiple internal search tools that had been developed and run by China-based ByteDance engineers for scraping TikTok user data, including US user data… bulk user information based on the user’s content or expressions, including views on gun control, abortion, and religion.”
Go to Article
Excerpt from www.theregister.com
The US Department of Justice has alleged that TikTok shipped personal information to China and allowed profiling of the short video app’s users based on their attitudes to some ticklish topics.
The Department’s views emerged in a filing [PDF] from the US government in response to attempts by TikTok and its parent company ByteDance to strike down laws that force a sale of the platform’s stateside operations – and closure if that can’t be arranged.
The filing details an internal tool called Lark that TikTok staff use for internal communications. The DoJ alleges “significant amounts of restricted US user data (including but not limited to personally identifiable information)” was shared over Lark.
“This resulted in certain sensitive US person data being contained in Lark channels and, therefore, stored on Chinese servers and accessible to ByteDance employees located in China,” the filing asserts.
It gets worse: the filing claims “Lark contained multiple internal search tools that had been developed and run by China-based ByteDance engineers for scraping TikTok user data, including US user data.”
.jpg%2F500px-Donald_Trump_(53953173435).jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=1eb09485c9f1cd57919082677e15526c735bd86eb8152493e737ff4709ce030d)
