Senators Ask FTC to Investigate TikTok Data Collection – The Wall Street Journal

“While we understand and appreciate the various national security concerns raised against TikTok to date, the purpose of this inquiry is to raise specific attention to the practice highlighted in the mentioned reports,” the senators said in a letter Thursday.

The Journal reported on Tuesday that TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., bypassed a privacy safeguard in Google’s Android devices to collect unique identifiers, called MAC addresses, from millions of mobile devices. The collected identifiers, often used for online advertising, would allow the company to track users’ online behavior without their consent.

TikTok collected MAC addresses for at least 15 months, ending with an update released Nov. 18 of last year, as ByteDance was falling under intense scrutiny in Washington, the Journal’s testing showed. The senators asked the FTC to investigate whether the company had stopped collecting these unique identifiers.

A TikTok spokeswoman said in a statement that its app “is not unique in the amount of information it collects, compared to other mobile apps.” The company reiterated that the current version of its app doesn’t collect MAC addresses and encouraged users “to download the most current version of TikTok.”

The company has previously said it collects less personal data than U.S. social media companies such as Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. TikTok didn’t respond to detailed questions about the Journal’s findings.

The FTC declined to comment on the letter. A Google spokesperson said earlier that the company was investigating the Journal’s findings.

While many mobile apps like those from Facebook and Google collect a wide range of data from users, TikTok’s collection particularly concerned the senators due to ongoing national security concerns surrounding ByteDance. They also raised the question of whether TikTok had gathered data covered by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law that protects children under the age of 13 from many data collection efforts without parental permission.

The request and the Journal article come as ByteDance faces pressure from the White House over its data collection practices due to concerns information from the app could be used to help China track U.S. government officials. ByteDance is weighing a potential sale to suitors including Microsoft Corp., and TikTok has said it doesn’t share data with the Chinese government.