The team behind the monitoring project — ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control department — is led by Beijing-based executive Song Ye, who reports to ByteDance cofounder and CEO Rubo Liang.TikTok and ByteDance did not answer questions about whether Internal Audit has specifically targeted any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists.“Like most companies our size, we have an internal audit function responsible for objectively auditing and evaluating the company and our employees' adherence to our codes of conduct,” said ByteDance spokesperson Jennifer Banks in a statement.TikTok did not respond to questions about whether it has ever served different content or experiences to government officials, regulators, activists or journalists than the general public in the TikTok app.Facebook did not respond directly to the assertions in the book, but a spokesperson told the San Jose Mercury News in 2018 that, like other companies, Facebook “routinely use[s] business records in workplace investigations.” “It is impossible to keep data that should not be stored in CN from being retained in CN-based servers.” But an important factor distinguishes ByteDance’s planned collection of private users’ information from those cases: TikTok recently told lawmakers that access to certain U.S. user data — likely including location — will be “limited only to authorized personnel, pursuant to protocols being developed with the U.S. Government.” TikTok and ByteDance did not answer questions about whether Internal Audit executive Song Ye or other members of the department are “authorized personnel” for the purposes of these protocols."