EPA
ANNOUNCEMENTS•
Staff at ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of popular video app TikTok, improperly accessed data from American TikTok users, including two journalists, last summer. This was stated by an internal investigation of the company, according to the American media.
ByteDance has laid off four employees. Two of them worked from China and two from the United States.
Reporters from Forbes business magazine have been bugged since last summer, and were checked whether they were physically close to ByteDance staff. Among other things, employees had access to journalists’ IP addresses and user data.
Leak investigation
Employees got their hands on that data when they were investigating a possible ByteDance leak to reporters. Internal conversations and company documents would be shared with the press.
Forbes published several articles about TikTok sharing sensitive user data with the Chinese government. An investigation into the leaks was then launched. The cause of the leak, however, has not been identified The New York Times.
According to the business magazine, two more of their journalists have been targeted by ByteDance. The tech company says this did not come up in its own research. The company will reanalyze the raw data to determine if that claim is correct.
‘Data in the hands of the Chinese government’
The revelations come at a time of growing concern in US politics about the privacy and security risks facing TikTok users. An estimated 100 million Americans use the popular app.
TikTok is too closely tied to its Chinese parent company, according to US security officials. According to them, this means that sensitive information ends up in the hands of the Chinese government, which Beijing vehemently denies.
The US Senate passed a bill last week that would ban federal employees from using TikTok on government devices.
The app has been working for months on a deal with the US government that would allow the company to keep US user data entirely in the US. This should be done, among other things, by storing American data on servers in the USA.
