Nearly content-free article. The meat seems to be:
> TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan said that TikTok collects approximate location information based on users’ IP addresses to “among other things, help show relevant content and ads to users, comply with applicable laws, and detect and prevent fraud and inauthentic behavior."
> But the material reviewed by Forbes indicates that ByteDance's Internal Audit team was planning to use this location information to surveil individual American citizens, not to target ads or any of these other purposes. Forbes is not disclosing the nature and purpose of the planned surveillance referenced in the materials in order to protect sources. TikTok and ByteDance did not answer questions about whether Internal Audit has specifically targeted any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists.
Right at the beginning. I thought the rest of the article would make this interesting, but instead it talked about what Uber did and what Facebook did (I assume to fill space), then told a story about people feeling suspicious and nothing interesting happening.
Forbes is a shitty outlet, like the International Business Times, where you float dubious stories, then get an army of bots and enraged nationalists to tweet links to them, then the NYT and WaPo both write stories about the Forbes story so they don't have to sign any claims it makes, but they can still spread them. Then I assume the FBI will open an investigation into the NYT story about the tweets about the Forbes story about nothing, and somebody on the floor of Congress will demand to know why we're treating China with kid gloves when at this very moment the FBI is investigating the NYT reporting on the tweets about the Forbes story about how TikTok collects location data just like everybody else.
This story should be taken as of a similar quality to the rest of Forbes' journalism (however little of it there is.)
Forbes has really gone downhill over the past decade. I think anyone who's been around the block takes their stories with a giant pinch of salt nowadays.
> TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan said that TikTok collects approximate location information based on users’ IP addresses to “among other things, help show relevant content and ads to users, comply with applicable laws, and detect and prevent fraud and inauthentic behavior."
> But the material reviewed by Forbes indicates that ByteDance's Internal Audit team was planning to use this location information to surveil individual American citizens, not to target ads or any of these other purposes. Forbes is not disclosing the nature and purpose of the planned surveillance referenced in the materials in order to protect sources. TikTok and ByteDance did not answer questions about whether Internal Audit has specifically targeted any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists.
Right at the beginning. I thought the rest of the article would make this interesting, but instead it talked about what Uber did and what Facebook did (I assume to fill space), then told a story about people feeling suspicious and nothing interesting happening.
Forbes is a shitty outlet, like the International Business Times, where you float dubious stories, then get an army of bots and enraged nationalists to tweet links to them, then the NYT and WaPo both write stories about the Forbes story so they don't have to sign any claims it makes, but they can still spread them. Then I assume the FBI will open an investigation into the NYT story about the tweets about the Forbes story about nothing, and somebody on the floor of Congress will demand to know why we're treating China with kid gloves when at this very moment the FBI is investigating the NYT reporting on the tweets about the Forbes story about how TikTok collects location data just like everybody else.
This story should be taken as of a similar quality to the rest of Forbes' journalism (however little of it there is.)