Employees of the parent company of the TikTok platform have improperly accessed data from the short video sharing platform to track down journalists and identify sources who disclosed information to the media, Agence France Presse reported on Friday.
France Presse cites an email from ByteDance’s general counsel, Erich Andersen, to which it had access, which reveals that several Chinese technology employees had access to the data of two journalists who wrote about the company.
According to the email, officials wanted to identify links between Bytedance workers and a Financial Times reporter and a former BuzzFeed reporter, who covered matters related to the company, using confidentially obtained information.
The employees identified by Bytedance as having been in contact with these journalists no longer work for the company, the email says, without elaborating on the total number of people involved.
Speaking to AFP, ByteDance condemned the “unfortunate initiative that seriously violated the company’s code of conduct.”
The IP addresses of the journalists were obtained to determine if they were in the same location as ByteDance colleagues suspected of divulging sensitive information, revealed an internal report broadcast by Erich Andersen.
This information undermines the image that TikTok wants to convey to customers and governments: that it is a safe company and concerned about protecting user data. This is because critics of the short video app have highlighted the fact that the data is accessible to ByteDance, the company that controls the platform and is theoretically subject to the control of the Chinese Communist Party.
On the other hand, some experts consider these concerns exaggerated, noting that malicious actors can gain access to this data, regardless of who owns the platform.
TikTok indicated this year that it stores all the information of American users in that country.
Source: TSF
