![]() ![]() "When an authoritarian country like China is able to amass a lot of information about citizens in another country, that's going to raise all sorts of red flags,” former National Security Agency general counsel Glenn Gerstell told Forbes. Though there is no known instance of this tool or others at TikTok being used against foreign adversaries, such information could jeopardize the safety of soldiers and citizens alike. Data on users from Ukraine and Russia, including details about who they communicate with on the app, has been available in the tool, according to the TikTok employee and internal materials obtained by Forbes. “We can’t ban them from the data they already have.”įormer NSA general counsel Glenn Gerstellīeyond the India case, company-wide access to a tool like this could be highly problematic in the context of geopolitical conflict. This powerful demographic data, especially on TikTok’s unmatched Gen Z userbase, could also be highly valuable for commercial purposes, the employee added. “From, if you want to start a movement, if you want to divide people, if you want to do any kind of operation to influence the public on the app, you can just use that information to target those groups,” they said. In the wrong hands, the employee noted, that information could be dangerous. That includes everyone from prominent public figures to the average person, according to the employee and a Forbes review of the tool. The current TikTok employee told Forbes that nearly anyone with basic access to company tools-including employees in China-can easily look up the closest contacts and other sensitive information about any user. The data in this particular tool appears to be frozen in time for the India users for other countries like the U.S., where TikTok is widely used today, it updates in real-time. The company would not say how many Indian accounts can be viewed in the internal tool, but TikTok had roughly 150 million monthly active users there at the time it was shut down, according to data analytics firm Sensor Tower. (Nikhil Gandhi, who was then head of TikTok in India, said at the time that TikTok had “not shared any information of our users in India with any foreign government, including the Chinese government.”) The ban did not seem to call for deletion of app data that had already been captured and stored.Īs a result, the profiles of Indian users who once used TikTok can still be found online, though their owners haven’t been able to post since the 2020 ban. The purpose of India’s 2020 ban appears to have focused on preventing public access to TikTok in the country going forward, given concerns about the app potentially sending data it had collected on Indian users back to China. “All user data is subject to our robust internal policy controls surrounding access, retention, and deletion.” ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment. “We have steadfastly complied, and continue to remain in full compliance, with the Government of India order since it was implemented,” TikTok spokesperson Jason Grosse said in an email. Neither company would say whether TikTok continues to use the data it collected from its past users in India. The TikTok employee described it as a key to building a “digital dossier” on any user, including those with private accounts. The same UID can be used across TikTok and ByteDance’s other internal tools to find even more information about the person-including their search behavior. Staff can plug in a TikToker’s unique identifier or UID, a string of numbers tied to more detailed data about the person, to retrieve the TikTok usernames (often, first and last name) of hundreds of friends and acquaintances the region where they live and how they share TikTok content with phone contacts and users across other social platforms. One social mapping tool-which the TikTok employee jokingly called “NSA-To-Go”-can spit out a list of any public or private user’s closest connections on TikTok and personally identifiable information about them, and it still pulls up the TikTok profiles of people in India, according to a review by Forbes. “I don’t think aware of how much of their data is exposed to China right now, even with the ban in place.” ![]()
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