Last month, the popular social video app TikTok finalized a deal with investors, including Oracle, to appease a bipartisan bill that called on the app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to divest — or be banned in the United States.
The deal launched a frenzy among its US-based users over possible censorship, with some accusing it of taking down footage of ICE agents or restricting searches for words, such as “Epstein.” While TikTok denied these claims, pointing to a “data center power outage,” the app also changed its privacy policy at the time — now allowing it to collect more detailed data on its users, including their precise locations.
That sparked new fears. As The New Republic argues, TikTok’s deal means that agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whose deportation efforts have been supercharged under the Trump administration, could skip tedious court-ordered data requests and monitor users by buying their data from private data brokers that obtain the info from TikTok directly — a “highly ironic” development, the magazine writes, considering the ByteDance deal was motivated in the first place by fears over Chinese state-sponsored surveillance.
Users’ “Mobile Advertising ID” broadcasts their exact GPS coordinates to data brokerages, information that could then land in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security, the New Republic suggested. Meanwhile, ICE could use the data to build a probabilistic “confidence score” for individuals and declare protesters and legal observers “domestic terrorists.”
It’s not an unreasonable fear. Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, an extremely close ally to president Donald Trump, has even made remarks about AI ushering in an era where “citizens are on their best behavior” due to mass surveillance.
The controversial ICE is already making use of an app called ELITE, which was developed by intelligence contractor Palantir, to inform agents ahead of neighborhood raids, as 404 Media reported last month.
“One can easily imagine a scenario where TikTok provides the last missing piece of data — user location and citizenship status — that ICE needs to green-light one of its raids,” The New Republic‘s Logan McMillen wrote.
And when we asked directly, TikTok pointedly declined to provide a comment and would neither confirm nor deny that US immigration authorities were accessing data about its users. ICE didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.
Meanwhile, many netizens have heard enough.
“Yeah, everyone just go ahead and delete TikTok now if you haven’t already,” one user wrote.
More on TikTok: TikTok Accounts Are Using AI Slop to Sell Seeds to Plants That Don’t Exist
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