The U.S. Department of Justice has alleged that TikTok sent personal information to China and allowed profiling of the short video app's users based on their attitudes toward some titillating topics.
How China is Using TikTok to Collect Your Personal Data and Why You Should Be Worried
The agency'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 would force a sale of the platform's government operations — and shutdown if that can't be arranged.
The archive describes an internal tool called Lark that TikTok staff use for internal communication. The DoJ alleges that "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 personal data being contained in Lark channels and therefore being stored on Chinese servers and accessible to ByteDance employees in China," the filing said.