The purpose of India’s 2020 ban appears to have focused on preventing public access to TikTok in the country going forward, given concerns about the app potentially sending data it had collected on Indian users back to China. “All user data is subject to our robust internal policy controls surrounding access, retention, and deletion.” ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment. “We have steadfastly complied, and continue to remain in full compliance, with the Government of India order since it was implemented,” TikTok spokesperson Jason Grosse said in an email. Neither company would say whether TikTok continues to use the data it collected from its past users in India.
The TikTok employee described it as a key to building a “digital dossier” on any user, including those with private accounts. The same UID can be used across TikTok and ByteDance’s other internal tools to find even more information about the person-including their search behavior. Staff can plug in a TikToker’s unique identifier or UID, a string of numbers tied to more detailed data about the person, to retrieve the TikTok usernames (often, first and last name) of hundreds of friends and acquaintances the region where they live and how they share TikTok content with phone contacts and users across other social platforms.
One social mapping tool-which the TikTok employee jokingly called “NSA-To-Go”-can spit out a list of any public or private user’s closest connections on TikTok and personally identifiable information about them, and it still pulls up the TikTok profiles of people in India, according to a review by Forbes. “I don’t think aware of how much of their data is exposed to China right now, even with the ban in place.”
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