According to multiple former employees of social media platform TikTok, the popular app tracked users who watched gay content and kept a list of some of them in a database.
TikTok employees in the U.S., U.K. and Australia have raised concerns about this data tracking to high-level executives within the last several years, warning that the data could be shared with other groups or used to "blackmail" users.
A TikTok spokesperson recently told the Wall Street Journal that this practice has stopped, at least in the U.S., as of last year, and mentioned that "safeguarding the privacy and security of people who use TikTok" is one of the platform’s top priorities.
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The revelations come as U.S. lawmakers consider regulating or even outright banning the social media platform in the country amid fears of TikTok providing user data to the Chinese government. The app is belongs to Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported former TikTok employees "were able to find what they described internally as a list of users who watch gay content on the popular app."
According to the allegations, the app "cataloged videos users watched under topics such as LGBT, short for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender." Additionally, ID numbers of some of these users were stored in a "dashboard" that "could be viewed by some employees."
TikTok also reportedly had other compiled lists of users in its database, though the former employees were less concerned about their sensitivity. They did raise concerns about the gay content cataloging to TikTok higher-ups, however.
The outlet reported that "TikTok workers in the U.S., U.K. and Australia in 2020 and 2021 raised concerns about this practice to higher-level executives, saying they feared employees might share the data with outside parties, or that it could be used to blackmail users."
As the Wall Street Journal noted, some data collection – with social media companies inferring "traits about their users based on online behavior" – is normal and used to "to select which content or ads to serve to users."
"Social-media and ad-tech industry practices, however, discourage tracking potentially sensitive traits such as sexuality, according to people who work with digital information," the report claimed, adding that "This data can essentially create a list of vulnerable users in parts of the world where some LGBT people face harassment and violence."
A TikTok spokesperson told the Journal that the list of users who watched gay content "was deleted in the U.S. nearly a year ago," and claimed that the app "doesn’t identify potentially sensitive information such as sexual orientation or race of users based on what they watch."
"The data represents users’ interests and isn’t necessarily a sign of someone’s identity," the outlet said, citing the spokesperson.
When Fox News Digital reached out to the platform with questions on these lists, TikTok pointed the outlet to a TikTok statement, which essentially reiterated the spokesperson’s claims.
It read, "Safeguarding the privacy and security of people who use TikTok is one of our top priorities. TikTok does not identify individuals or infer sensitive information such as sexual orientation or race based on what they watch."
