The Chinese company ByteDance, which owns TikTok, disclosed on Thursday that some of its workers had illegally collected the data of American TikTok users, which included two journalists.
According to an email from ByteDance general counsel Erich Andersen, employees of the company had access to the data as part of a failed investigation into information leaks earlier this year. The employees had access to two reporters' IP addresses and other information via their TikTok accounts, as well as the data of a limited number of individuals connected to the journalist. The company stated that they were searching for connections between two journalists—a former BuzzFeed reporter and a Financial Times reporter—and ByteDance, however, they were unable to find any breaches.
The inquiry, which was initiated in response to a Forbes story, emphasizes the privacy and security dangers associated with TikTok that have been brought up by American lawmakers, state governors, and administrations for more than two years, and supports some of the information in that study. More than a dozen states have prohibited TikTok from being used on government-issued devices, and the business has been in extensive discussions with the administration about security and privacy policies that would prevent ByteDance and the Chinese government from possibly gaining access to user data in the United States.
Two employees in China and two in the US of ByteDance who were associated with the incident were sacked. Company representatives announced that they were taking extra precautions to safeguard user data. In an effort to identify the source of leaks, ByteDance traced several Forbes journalists, including those who had previously worked for BuzzFeed, according to a Forbes investigation.
In an effort to completely remove user data from China, TikTok has taken efforts to disassociate itself from ByteDance and is currently in talks with the US government. The fate of those talks is still up in the air.
