Workers at TikTok improperly accessed data
According to The Wall Street Journal, which cited unnamed sources, ByteDance has acknowledged that one of its employees hacked customer data for TikTok.
An investigation by the Chinese owner of TikTok revealed that the social media business had access to the data of two American journalists.
The General Counsel of TikTok said in an internal email that workers from the departments of Internal Audit and Risk Control had devised “a flawed plan” to access the data of the journalists in order to find leaks of private corporate information.
The U.S. government has scrutinized TikTok, and numerous states have prohibited its use on official equipment.
According to an email obtained by Reuters, ByteDance, the Chinese firm that owns the well-known video app TikTok, announced on Thursday that some of its employees were fired for improperly accessing the TikTok user data of two journalists.
According to the email from ByteDance general counsel Erich Andersen, employees of the company had access to the data as part of an unsuccessful investigation into information leaks earlier this year. They were looking for any connections between two journalists, a former BuzzFeed reporter and a Financial Times reporter, and the company.
More than a dozen governors have prohibited state employees from using TikTok on state-owned devices, and Congress is expected to enact legislation this week prohibiting US government employees from installing or using the app on their government-owned devices.
In a statement, The Financial Times stated that “It is entirely wrong to eavesdrop on reporters, interfere with their work, or intimidate their sources.
Before deciding on our official response, we will be looking into this story more thoroughly.”
The piece, according to BuzzFeed News spokesperson Lizzie Grams, showed “a flagrant contempt for the privacy and rights of journalists as well as TikTok users,” and the firm was extremely troubled by it.
In an effort to determine whether journalists were in the same area as workers suspected of leaking confidential information, the staff members examined the IP addresses of journalists.
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