Responding to Forbes Report, TikTok Denies Its Parent Company is Tracking US Citizens' GPS Locations

JAKARTA - The TikTok team has denied the existence of GPS location tracking by its parent company, ByteDance, on citizens in the United States (US).

The denial was conveyed directly by TikTok's communications team on Twitter, after reports emerged from Forbes claiming that ByteDance was using the TikTok application to track user locations in the US.

TikTok said Forbes did not include part of the company's statement denying the merits of the allegations.

"TikTok does not collect accurate GPS location information from US users, which means TikTok cannot monitor US users as the article suggests," the TikTok Communications team wrote.

The company acknowledges that TikTok is in no way used to "target" any members of the US government, activists, public figures or journalists.

"We also don't provide them with a different content experience from other users," he further explained.

The Forbes article also mentions that the team behind this tracking is part of ByteDance's Audit team and Risk Control Department.

Again, TikTok denied the allegations saying: "Our Internal Audit team follows established policies and processes to obtain the information they need to conduct internal investigations of violations of the company's code of conduct, as is standard at companies across our industry."

In June, TikTok has also moved the default storage location of US user data to Oracle cloud servers located in the US.

The decision was made just as BuzzFeed News published a report about China-based ByteDance employees repeatedly accessing nonpublic data about TikTok users in the US.