Despite getting banned in 2020, TikTok still has access to data of Indian users
Despite getting banned in 2020, TikTok still has access to data of Indian users
Almost three years after TikTok’s largest market, India, banned the Chinese-owned social media app due to geopolitical tensions, a Forbes report has revealed that troves of personal data from Indian citizens who used TikTok are still widely accessible to employees at the company and its Beijing-based parent, ByteDance.
Also read: Surprise, surprise: TikTok lying about Chinese spying, former employee tells US Congress
The news comes as President Joe Biden’s administration promises to ban the platform used by over 100 million Americans unless TikTok’s Chinese owner sells its share. Officials at the top levels of the United States government see a blanket TikTok prohibition as a potential answer to the country’s national security worries about China’s ability to spy on or influence Americans.
Some have referred to India as a “guide star,” encouraging the United States to follow in its footsteps.
TikTok, ByteDance and China still have access to Indian user’s data
“I don’t think that Indians are aware of how much of their data is exposed to China right now, even with the ban in place,” said the Forbes report while quoting a current TikTok employee.
According to the employee, almost anyone with rudimentary access to the businesses’ tools can retrieve and analyse granular data about previous TikTok users in India.
ByteDance has more than 110,000 employees around the world, including in China and Russia, but reportedly fired its entire India staff last month. Another source verified separately that Indians’ data has been accessible since the nation banned the app.
One social mapping tool dubbed “NSA-To-Go” can spit out a list of any public or private user’s closest TikTok connections as well as personally identifiable information about them, and it still pulls up TikTok profiles of people in India.
Staff can use a TikToker’s unique identifier or UID, a string of numbers linked to more detailed data about the person, to retrieve the TikTok usernames often, first and last names, of hundreds of friends and acquaintances; the region where they live and how they share TikTok content with phone contacts and users across other social platforms.
Creating a digital dossier
The same UID can be used across TikTok and ByteDance’s internal tools to find out even more about the individual, including their search behaviour. According to the TikTok staffer, it is the secret to creating a “digital dossier” on any user, including those with private accounts.
Neither TikTok or ByteDance would say whether TikTok is still using the data it gathered from previous users in India.
“We have steadfastly complied, and will continue to comply, with the Government of India order since its implementation,” TikTok spokesperson Jason Grosse said in an email. “All user data is subject to our stringent internal policy controls for access, retention, and deletion.”
As a consequence, the profiles of Indian TikTok users can still be discovered online, even though their proprietors haven’t been able to post since the 2020 ban. The business declined to say how many Indian profiles can be watched in the internal tool, but TikTok had approximately 150 million monthly active users when it was shut down, according to data analytics firm Sensor Tower.
For Indian users, the data in this tool appears to be frozen in time; for other countries, such as the United States, where TikTok is extensively used today, it changes in real time.
Why the US needs to pay closer attention to how they ban TikTok
Anyone with basic access to business tools, including workers in China, can quickly look up any user’s closest connections and other sensitive information.
According to the employee, this encompasses everyone from famous public figures to ordinary individual. That knowledge could be harmful in the wrong hands, according to the employee.
“From [their social graphs], you can simply target those groups if you want to start a movement, divide people, or do any kind of operation to influence the public on the app,” the employee explained. This powerful demographic data, particularly on TikTok’s unrivalled Gen Z userbase, could also be extremely useful for commercial reasons, according to the employee.
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