TikTok’s Parent Company Fires Four Workers for Improper Access of User Data – ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of the popular video app TikTok, announced on Thursday that certain former workers inappropriately accessed the TikTok user data of two journalists, according to an email obtained by Reuters. ByteDance employees accessed the data as part of an unsuccessful effort to investigate leaks of company information earlier this year, according to an email from ByteDance general counsel Erich Andersen. They were attempting to identify potential connections between two journalists, a former BuzzFeed reporter and a Financial Times reporter, and company employees.
Employees examined journalists’ IP addresses to determine if they were in the same location as employees suspected of leaking confidential information. The disclosure, first reported by the New York Times, might increase the pressure on TikTok in Washington, D.C., from Congress and the Biden administration regarding the security of US user data. According to a source with knowledge of the situation, four ByteDance employees engaged in the incident were fired, including two in China and two in the United States. Officials at the company stated they were taking further measures to protect user information.
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This week, Congress is expected to enact a law prohibiting government employees from downloading or using TikTok on government-owned devices, and more than a dozen governors have prohibited state employees from using TikTok on state-owned devices. The Financial Times issued the following statement: “spying on reporters, interfering with their work or intimidating their sources is completely unacceptable. We’ll be investigating this story more fully before deciding our formal response.” BuzzFeed News spokesperson Lizzie Grams said the company was deeply disturbed by the report, saying it showed “a blatant disregard for the privacy and rights of journalists as well as TikTok users.”
Forbes announced on Thursday ByteDance has followed various Forbes journalists, including former BuzzFeed employees, “as part of a covert surveillance campaign” designed to identify the source of leaks. Forbes’ chief content officer, Randall Lane, described it as “a direct assault on the idea of a free press and its critical role in a functioning democracy.” TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew said in a separate email to employees seen by Reuters that such “misconduct is not at all representative of what I know our company’s principles to be.” He said the company “will continue to enhance these access protocols, which have already been significantly improved and hardened since this initiative took place.”
Chew stated that the company has spent the past 15 months developing TikTok USData Security (USDS) to ensure that protected TikTok US user data remains in the United States. “We are completing the migration of protected US user data management to the USDS department and have been systematically cutting off access points,” he wrote. ByteDance also said it was restructuring the Internal Audit and Risk Control department, and the global investigations function would be split out and restructured.
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The US government committee on foreign investment in the United States (CFIUS), a national security body, has attempted for months to reach a national security agreement with ByteDance to protect the data of more than 100 million US TikTok users, but it seems unlikely that a deal will be reached before the end of the year. Republican Senator Marco Rubio said of the incident ByteDance “is desperate to tamp down growing bipartisan concerns about how it enables the Chinese Communist Party to use – and potentially weaponize – the data of American citizens. Every day it becomes more clear that we need to ban TikTok.”
