The Chinese company ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, admitted that its employees illegally obtained the data of a number of users of the social network, including two journalists.
⠀
The company said an internal investigation found employees “illegally obtained data from US TikTok users, including two reporters.”
⠀
Over the summer, several employees of the ByteDance team responsible for monitoring employee behavior tried to find sources of alleged leaks of internal conversations and business documents to reporters. As part of these efforts, they gained access to the IP addresses and other data of two reporters and a small number of others.
⠀
It is noted that the results of the investigation were announced by ByteDance General Counsel Erich Andersen. The company said that all four employees who received unauthorized access to user data were fired (two of them worked in the US, two in China).
⠀
The reporters whose data was accessed are Emily Baker-White, who previously wrote for BuzzFeed and now works for Forbes, and Christina Criddle of the Financial Times.
⠀
Earlier, the US Senate approved a bill banning TikTok from being installed on federal government electronic devices. The use of the popular application for creating and viewing short videos is also banned by civil servants in several US states. A provision to ban the use of TikTok by government employees has been included in the US 2023 budget proposal.
