TikTok employees in China maintained a database of users who viewed LGBT content, according to a new report.
Typically, users are not required to disclose their sexual preference when signing up for TikTok, but videos related to LGBT interests are categorized internally, reports the Wall Street Journal.
A former employee told the newspaper that employees have been using the list for about a year. TikTok is owned by parent company ByteDance, which has offices in Beijing.
Management in the US, UK and Australia were made aware of employee concerns about monitoring LGBT users in 2022.
Employees stressed that access to such data in countries where homosexuality is a crime could be dangerous for the app’s users or lead to blackmail. Access to the list was restricted, but remained intact.
TikTok CEO Show Zi Chew will appear before a house committee in March 2023
A TikTok spokesperson has said the lists of users who viewed LGBT content were for regular business practices
The platform has 150 million US users, but it has been dogged by persistent claims that it threatens national security and users’ privacy or could be used to promote pro-Beijing propaganda and misinformation.
In March, CEO Show Zi Chew appeared before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce to answer some of those claims. Chew tried to convince lawmakers not to ban the app or force its sale to new owners.
TikTok takes all the videos created by users and divides them into categories and then into subcategories, the employee told WSJ.
The subcategories for the “alt female” category are: “tattoos, some lesbian content, and “Portland.
“‘
Other employees told WSJ that the categorization was used to increase engagement and monitor trending topics.
Despite restricting access to the list of categories in 2022, it will remain accessible to the company that keeps TikTok’s data in the US, the WSJ reports.
In 2020, TikTok started a $1.5 billion program called Project Texas, which posts data from US users through servers run by Oracle, the Silicon Valley company it partnered with in an attempt to circumvent a nationwide ban.
Older US user data stored on non-Oracle servers will be deleted this year. Under this arrangement, Beijing will not have access to the data, TikTok’s CEO said.
In a conversation with the newspaper, the company said that monitoring LGBT viewership numbers was no different than monitoring other viewers.
British journalist Cristina Criddle, pictured here, was spied on by TikTok in an attempt to uncover the sources of her critical stories
On the same day the Wall Street Journal report came out, the British journalist spied on by TikTok spoke out about the surveillance, which was first reported in December.
British journalist Cristina Criddle was spied on by TikTok in an attempt to uncover the sources of her critical stories.
Tech operatives snooped on the location of Criddle, a technology correspondent for the Financial Times, through an account she had created in the name of her pet cat, Buffy.
The hack of Criddle’s and another journalist’s phones was blamed on “misconduct by a few individuals” by Beijing-based parent company ByteDance.
But experts say a lot of effort must have gone into tracking her down through the cat account, which didn’t give her real name and only had 170 followers.
Hackers tried to match her IP address – the unique number for every device connected to the internet – to colleagues suspected of informing her, to prove they had been in close proximity to each other.
Criddle spoke about it for the first time, telling the BBC that the ‘really chilling’ episode was ‘quite violent’.
She added, “I’m super careful right now. I need to make sure there is no chance of my devices being tracked. If my location is being monitored 24/7, it’s not just limited to my actions at work… this also applied to my personal life.’
ByteDance has said it “deeply regrets” the “significant violation” of its rules and has fired those involved.
Asked about the March incident at the US congressional committee hearing, TikTok’s CEO claimed, “I don’t think espionage is the right way to describe it.”
Both the FBI and Federal Communications Commission officials have warned that ByteDance could share TikTok user data, such as browsing history, location and biometric identifiers, with China’s authoritarian government.
Officials fear that TikTok, which like many other social media platforms collects massive amounts of data about its users, would be forced to give it to Beijing under a 2017 law that forces companies to disclose any personal data relevant to national security. hand over to China.
The White House ordered US federal agencies to remove TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices. Congress, the US military and more than half of the US states have already banned the app.