TikTok Publishes First Transparency Report Highlighting Legal Requests
The company's public policy and corporate affairs attorney, Eric Ebenstein, said the report "provides important insight and clarity to our users regarding the volume and nature of governmental requests for our users' account information and other legal notifications."
January 03, 2020 at 05:05 PM
3 minute read
Tik Tok app. Photo: XanderSt/Shutterstock.com
TikTok published its first transparency report this week outlining the number of legal requests it received in the first half of 2019 to remove or restrict certain accounts.
In a blog post published Monday, the company's public policy and corporate affairs attorney, Eric Ebenstein, said the report "provides important insight and clarity to our users regarding the volume and nature of governmental requests for our users' account information and other legal notifications."
Ebenstein said the company will occasionally get requests from government or law enforcement agencies in countries where TikTok is available. The report released earlier this week covers Jan. 1, 2019 to June 30, 2019. A second report covering the second half of 2019 will be released later this year.
"For example, the report shows how we responded to the 298 legal requests for information we received from 28 countries over this 6-month period. In balancing our responsibilities to law enforcement with our respect for the privacy of our users, we respond only to legally valid requests and only with the requisite amount of information needed," Ebenstein said in the blog post.
In that six-month period in the U.S., government and law enforcement agencies made 79 requests for data on a total of 255 accounts. There were no legal requests for information on user data from a Chinese authority, according to the report.
The transparency report also highlights the number of requests from government entities to remove or restrict accounts or take down content. In the U.S., there were six requests for seven accounts in the first half of 2019 to remove accounts or content. Seven accounts were removed or restricted in the U.S.
The report shows that China did not make any requests to remove or restrict any TikTok accounts. There has been concern over the use of TikTok in the U.S. In October, Sens. Tom Cotton and Chuck Schumer wrote a letter to the director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, asking the intelligence community to conduct an assessment of the national security risks posed by TikTok.
"TikTok's terms of service and privacy policies describe how it collects data from its users and their devices, including user content and communications, IP address, location-related data, device identifiers, cookies, metadata, and other sensitive personal information. While the company has stated that TikTok does not operate in China and stores U.S. user data in the U.S., ByteDance is still required to adhere to the laws of China," the letter says.
TikTok did not respond to request for additional comment Friday.
TikTok is not the first tech company to have a transparency report. Facebook puts out a quarterly community standards enforcement report. Twitter publishes its transparency report biannually. Uber recently released its own safety transparency report outlining the number of assault complaints the company gets.
Read More:
Uber Chief Legal Officer's Safety Report Could Spark Ongoing Industry Transparency
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