TikTok denies it could be used to track US citizens

TikTok has denied a report that a China-based team at its parent company ByteDance planned to use the app to track the locations of US citizens.

The social media giant said on Twitter that it has never been used to "target" the American government, activists, public figures or journalists.

The firm also says it does not collect precise location data from US users.

It was responding to a report in Forbes that data would have been accessed without users' knowledge or consent.

Sources cited documents it had seen, reported that ByteDance had started a monitoring project to investigate misconduct by current and former employees.

The developers of apps have come under scrutiny from authorities around the world, especially over the data of military and intelligence personnel.

In 2020, a US national security panel ordered ByteDance to sell TikTok's American business over concerns that users' data could be passed to the Chinese government.

TikTok said it migrated US users' information to servers at Austin-headquartered Oracle this June, to address some regulatory issues.

Meanwhile, TikTok is facing a £27m ($30m) fine in the UK, for failing to protect the privacy of children using the platform.

Last month, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office found that the video-sharing platform may have processed the data of under-13s without appropriate consent.

The watchdog said the breach took place over more than two years - until July 2020 - but that it had not yet drawn final conclusions.

Tiktok has disputed the findings and said they were "provisional".

TikTok is the world's fastest-growing social media app and has been downloaded more than 3.9 billion times.

It has made more than $6.2bn (£5.5bn) in gross revenue from in-app spending since its launch in 2017, according to analytics company Sensor Tower.