TikTok's Sensitive Word Monitoring Raises Privacy Concerns

(MENAFN) According to an article published by Forbes, ByteDance, the parent company of the popular social media app TikTok, is allegedly using a tool to track the use of "sensitive words" on its products. The article goes on to claim that several lists of such words were published by Forbes on Friday.

The detection tool is said to track every single use of the terms and logs the identity of the user and their location. While some posts containing the marked words may be blocked entirely, in other cases, the use of the words is simply being monitored. TikTok has apparently acknowledged collecting data on the "hit rate" of sensitive words, including when, where, and by whom they're accessed, but claims that this function is intended to help the company understand app performance. However, some experts have raised concerns that the use of this detection tool may indicate that ByteDance has specific concerns and wants to monitor who is using certain words, when, and how often. William Evanina, the former US head of counterintelligence, was quoted as saying that the tool is "proof positive that there are specific things that they are concerned about and they want to monitor who was saying them, when and how often."

Evanina went on to suggest that the Chinese government may be tracking American TikTokers who might say something critical of Beijing. These allegations are likely to raise further concerns about privacy and the use of personal data by social media companies.

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