Employees of Chinese tech giant ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) improperly accessed data from social media platform TikTok to track journalists in a bid to identify the source of leaks to the media, the company said yesterday.
The statement came after TikTok had gone to great lengths to convince users and governments that users’ data privacy is protected and that it poses no threat to national security.
However, parent company ByteDance yesterday said that several staffers accessed two journalists’ data as part of an internal probe into leaks of company information to the media.
Photo: Bloomberg
They had hoped to identify links between staff and a Financial Times reporter and a former BuzzFeed journalist, an e-mail from ByteDance general counsel Erich Andersen seen by Agence France-Presse said.
The two journalists reported on the contents of leaked company materials.
None of the employees found to have been involved remained employed by ByteDance, Andersen said, although he did not disclose how many had been fired.
ByteDance said in a statement that it condemned the “misguided initiative that seriously violated the company’s Code of Conduct.”
The employees had obtained the IP addresses in a bid to determine whether the journalists were in the same location as ByteDance colleagues suspected of disclosing confidential information, Andersen said, citing a review led by ByteDance’s compliance team and an external law firm.
However, the plan failed, as the IP addresses only revealed approximate location data, he said.
TikTok has again come under the spotlight in Washington, with the US Congress poised to approve a nationwide ban on using the wildly popular app on US government devices owing to perceived security risks.
The US House of Representatives could this week adopt a law prohibiting the use of TikTok on the professional smartphones of civil servants, a move that would follow bans in about 20 US states.
TikTok has sought to convince US authorities that US data stored on servers located in the country.
Following media reports, however, it has also admitted that China-based employees had access to US users’ data, although the company said it was under strict and highly limited circumstances.
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