The company policy added that the sensitive personal information would be processed “in accordance with applicable law” and that users can turn off location services in their device settings at any time.
Even before the new venture was established, TikTok collected location information based on a user’s SIM card or IP address, or both.
But it stopped short of collecting even approximate GPS information from American users operating the most updated version of the app, according to a 2024 version of its privacy policy.
The new American TikTok joint venture is also extending its permissions for gathering information about users interactions with TikTok’s artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
This includes prompts and questions submitted by users, as well as information about how, when, and where AI content was prompted or created.
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is comprised of three managing investors including cloud computing giant Oracle, which is investing heavily in AI infrastructure and has taken on significant debt to finance its ambitions in the burgeoning space.
Oracle is chaired by Larry Ellison, a Republican megadonor and longtime ally of US President Donald Trump, whose administration helped broker the US TikTok deal.
The agreement follows years of tussling between Washington and Beijing that began in Trump’s first presidential term, when he tried unsuccessfully to ban the app over national security concerns.
In 2024, the US passed a law that required the platform to be banned in the US by January 2025 if ByteDance failed to sell its US operations to American investors.
Trump repeatedly postponed the enforcement of legislation until the joint venture was finalised this week.
The 2024 law was prompted in part by concerns about the possibility that Beijing might access the data of TikTok’s American users.
In a statement onThursday, the new joint venture said its mandate was “to secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm through comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity measures”.
Oracle will oversee the retraining of TikTok’s powerful content recommendation algorithm on existing American user data, the joint venture said in its statement, adding that the algorithm “will be secured in Oracle’s U.S. cloud environment.”
ByteDance retains a minority stake just shy of 20% in the joint venture.
Other managing investors include the US tech investment firm Silver Lake and Abu-Dhabi state-owned investment fund MGX, which has done business with the Trump family’s crypto venture World Liberty Financial.
