Chinese ByteDance, the parent body of TikTok, stated that an internal investigation showed that its workers obtained data on a small number of U.S. users, including two reporters – Emily Baker-White, who wrote for BuzzFeed and is now at Forbes, and Cristina Criddle of the Financial Times who were covering stories concerning the company.
This acknowledges the privacy and security risks that U.S. officials have been concerned about for the past couple of years. There has been talks about banning the social media platform since the Trump era.
Employees of ByteDance admitted that they used the data to track the reporters’ physical movements as part of an attempt to track down the journalists’ sources. Chris Lepitak, the company’s chief internal auditor, China-based manager Song Ye and two others involved in the operation, have been fired.
The findings were revealed in two separate mails from ByteDance’s general counsel, Erich Andersen and ByteDance’s chief executive, Rubo Liang to their employees.
According to Mr Liang, “I was deeply disappointed when I was notified of the situation … and I’m sure you feel the same.” “The public trust that we have spent huge efforts building is going to be significantly undermined by the misconduct of a few individuals.”
Initially ByteDance and TikTok had denied the allegations when they were first reported by Forbes, claiming it “could not monitor US users in the way the article suggested”.
This looks really bad for ByteDance and TikTok as they have been under scrutiny for some time now. In June 2022, we reported that the United States Federal Communications Commissioner, Brendan Carr, wrote to Apple and Google, requesting both companies to remove TikTok from their app stores for “its pattern of surreptitious data practices.”
The US Commissioner alleged that the short-video networking platform isn’t just an app for sharing funny memes or videos but a “sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data.”
A week before this, BuzzFeed News reported that ByteDance’s employees had repeatedly accessed data about US TikTok users. The report cited leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings and said engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022.
TikTok, known in China as Douyin is a short-form video-hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 15 seconds to 10 minutes.
As of April 2022, the United States was the country with the largest TikTok audience by far, with approximately 136.5 million users engaging with the popular social video platform. TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media apps in the United States and especially popular with younger digital audiences.
