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.
The US business magazine, which cited documents it had seen, reported that ByteDance had started a monitoring project to investigate misconduct by current and former employees.
It said the project, which was run by a Beijing-based team, had planned to collect location data from a US citizen on at least two occasions.
The report said it was unclear whether American citizens’ data was ever collected but there had been a plan to obtain location data from US users’ devices.
-BBC