The Department of Justice alleges that TikTok sent personal information to China and allowed the short-video app to profile its users based on their attitudes on several sensitive topics.
The ministry’s view was made clear in the documents it submitted. [PDF] This is the US government’s response to TikTok and its parent company ByteDance trying to repeal legislation that would have forced them to sell the platform’s US operations and shut it down if they couldn’t.
The filing details an internal TikTok tool called Lark that TikTok staff use for internal communications, and the Department of Justice alleges that “substantial amounts of restricted U.S. user data, including but not limited to personally identifiable information,” were shared through Lark.
“As a result, sensitive data of certain U.S. persons was included in the Lark Channel, stored on servers in China and accessible to ByteDance employees in China,” the filing alleges.
To make matters worse, the complaint states, “Lark contained multiple internal search tools developed and operated by ByteDance engineers based in China to collect TikTok user data, including U.S. user data.”
These tools allowed the collection of “large amounts of user information based on their content and expressions, including their views on gun control, abortion, and religion.” The results of these efforts were available to view in China.
The filing also alleges that TikTok’s tools allow it to “trigger the suppression of content on the platform based on a user’s use of certain words. While the tools included certain policies that only applied to China-based users, similar policies may have been applied to TikTok users outside of China.”
It is not difficult to imagine this tool being used to suppress anti-Beijing comments or working in conjunction with profiling tools to target campaigns to interested audiences.
Oracle’s Perspective
The filing also makes multiple references to Oracle and the database giant’s efforts to become ByteDance’s US-based technology partner under a “National Security Agreement” (NSA), which would ideally force TikTok to operate under strict conditions. Big Red has proposed carving up TikTok data so that it can identify and separate matters relating to US-based users and store them in the US.
According to the filing, the government found the proposal insufficient because it “envisioned the transfer of significant amounts of U.S. user data to ByteDance and ultimately to China, and the agreement sought to preserve TikTok’s U.S. business and ByteDance’s extensive ties to its management.”
The possibility of Oracle acting as a watchdog over TikTok’s source code was also rejected on the grounds that, given the sheer size of the codebase (2 billion lines as of 2022), a review would require at least three years of work on the code that was in use at the time.
“However, the source code is not static,” the filing states. “ByteDance regularly updates the source code to add or modify TikTok’s features, and a thorough review would be impossible, even with Oracle’s extensive resources.”
The filing includes details suggesting Oracle might have been better off not winning the job as TikTok’s U.S. host, noting that Big Red “will need to sift through such data using both untested and experimental tools to ascertain whether the information was routed for legitimate commercial reasons or for malign reasons at the behest of Chinese actors.”
The Justice Department argued that Oracle and other technology providers could never know whether they had enough information to do the job properly.
“Private parties also lacked insight into ByteDance’s communications with Chinese authorities, ByteDance’s use of U.S. user data, or ByteDance’s other TikTok-related activities,” the filing argues, and as such, U.S. authorities “determined that the final proposed NSA posed too great a risk because trusted technology providers and other oversight agencies faced hurdles of significant scope and scale that they could not overcome.”
The arguments outlined above are scheduled to be argued in court on September 16th. Large portions of the filing are redacted, so there may be some more interesting arguments to come.
TikTok used its X account to refute the US action against the company.
“Nothing in this brief changes the fact that the Constitution is on our side,” Xeeted said. “Today, the government is once again taking this unprecedented step under the cover of classified information. We are confident that we will prevail in court.”®
