The DOJ says China’s TikTok sent very personal U.S. user data to the Chinese Community Party, and allowed the app’s users to be profiled based on their attitudes towards topics like gun control and abortion.
In a new filing, the DOJ notes that TikTok employees communicate internally with one another using a tool called Lark, and claimed that “significant amounts of restricted US user data (including but not limited to personally identifiable information)” was shared on this platform, according to a report by the Register.
“This resulted in certain sensitive U.S. person data being contained in Lark channels and, therefore, stored on Chinese servers and accessible to ByteDance employees located in China,” the DOJ continues in its filing.
To make matters worse, the DOJ goes on to allege that “Lark contained multiple internal search tools that had been developed and run by China-based ByteDance engineers for scraping TikTok user data, including U.S. user data.”
Those tools allowed for Chinese communists to collect and view “bulk user information based on the user’s content or expressions, including views on gun control, abortion, and religion,” the filing states.
The DOJ also claims that TikTok tools allow for “triggering of the suppression of content on the platform based on the user’s use of certain words. Although this tool contained certain policies that only applied to users based in China, others such policies may have been used to apply to TikTok users outside of China.”
Moreover, tech giant Oracle is also mentioned in the filing. As Breitbart News reported, despite the U.S. government’s efforts to prevent advanced AI chips from falling into the hands of the Chinese, some American companies are finding ways to circumvent these restrictions — Oracle being one avenue for this.
Oracle in particular has helped China’s TikTok by “renting” AI chips to the communist social media company.
Notably, Oracle being tasking with overseeing TikTok’s source code was also rejected due to the total volume of the codebase involving a review that would take at least three years to complete.
“But the source code is not static,” the DOJ filing states. “ByteDance regularly updates it to add and modify TikTok’s features. Even with Oracle’s considerable resources, perfect review would be an impossibility.”
The DOJ went on to say that Oracle and other tech providers wouldn’t be able to know if they have enough information to do the job correctly.
“Private parties also lack insight into ByteDance’s communications with PRC officials, ByteDance’s use of U.S. user data, and ByteDance’s other TikTok-related activities,” the filing asserts.
Therefore, U.S. authorities “determined that the Final Proposed NSA presented too great a risk because the trusted technology provider and other monitors faced massive scope and scale hurdles that could not be overcome.”
Last month, the FTC informed the DOJ that the Chinese app may be in violation of U.S. law on child privacy, saying that it has investigated TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance, and “uncovered reason to believe” the companies are “violating or are about to violate” the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
These cases are separate from the recently passed sell-or-ban legislation that calls on ByteDance, which is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party, to sell TikTok by January or else face a ban in the United States.
As Breitbart News reported, the move to ban TikTok unless ByteDance sells the app comes after years of concern over Chinese communists running a popular social media platform that has proven itself to be a danger for kids and teens, and whose parent company has already been caught snooping on journalists.
TikTok is also facing multiple lawsuits brought by several mourning families who say the Chinese social media platform is directly responsible for the deaths of their children.
Additionally, TikTok is widely considered a national security threat by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, with lawmakers already having banned the Chinese app from U.S. government devices.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
