TikTok rejects claims that it might be used to monitor US people.

A rumour that a China-based team at TikTok’s parent firm ByteDance intended to utilise the app to track the whereabouts of US individuals has been refuted.

The social media tech giant said on Twitter that neither the American government nor any activists, celebrities, or journalists have ever been “targeted.”

The company further claims that it doesn’t get exact location information from US consumers.

The statement was made in response to a Forbes article that claimed data would have been accessed without the users’ knowledge or consent.

According to the US business journal, who used papers it had access to, ByteDance had launched a surveillance effort to look into employee wrongdoing by both present and past workers.

It said that at least twice throughout the course of the project’s administration by a Beijing-based team, a US citizen’s location data was going to be collected.

According to the study, it was unclear if data on US people had actually been taken, although there had been a plan to gather location information from devices belonging to US customers.

The TikTok PR team said in a series of tweets that the study lacked “both rigour and journalistic integrity.”

“Forbes opted not to publish the piece of our reply that debunked the viability of its fundamental allegation: TikTok does not collect exact GPS location information from US users, therefore TikTok could not monitor US users in the manner the story stated,” the statement said.

A Forbes representative responded in response to a BBC request for comment: “We are confident in our sourcing, and we stand by our reporting.”

Authorities from all across the world are investigating app makers, particularly in relation to the data of military and intelligence employees.

2020 will be the year when a US national security tribunal ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok’s US operations due to worries that user data would be given to the Chinese government.

In order to solve various regulatory difficulties, TikTok said that in June it moved the data of US users to servers at Oracle, which has its headquarters in Austin.

For failing to safeguard the privacy of youngsters using the site, TikTok is currently facing a £27 million ($30 million) punishment in the UK.

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office discovered last month that the video-sharing site may have processed underage users’ data without getting their approval.

The watchdog stated that the breach occurred from July 2020 for more than two years, although it did not yet reach a conclusion.

The results were contested by Tiktok, who labelled them as “provisional.”

With over 3.9 billion downloads, TikTok is the fastest-growing social media app in the world.

Since its debut in 2017, it has generated more than $6.2 billion (£5.5 billion) in gross income via in-app purchases, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower.