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.\"
Those tools allowed collection of \"bulk user information based on the user's content or expressions, including views on gun control, abortion, and religion.\" The results of those efforts could be viewed in China.
The filing also alleges 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.\"
It's not hard to imagine how that tool could supress anti-Beijing comment, or in concert with the profiling tool help to target campaigns to interested audiences.
The Oracle angle
The filing also makes many mentions of Oracle and the database giant's efforts to become ByteDance's US-based technology partner under a \"national security agreement\" (NSA) that would ideally have TikTok operate under strict conditions. Big Red offered to segment TikTok data so it could identify matter describing US-based users, segment it, and store it stateside.
The filing states that the US government didn't find that offer adequate, as it \"contemplated extensive data flows of US users back to ByteDance and thus to China and because the agreement sought to maintain extensive engagement between TikTok's US operations and the leadership at ByteDance.\"
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