TikTok confirms that the journalists’ data was accessed by employees of its parent company | CNN Business

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TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has fired four employees who improperly accessed the personal data of two journalists on the platform, according to TikTok spokeswoman Brooke Oberwetter. he confirmed to CNN on Thursday.

The TikTok user data of the two journalists, who worked for the Financial Times and BuzzFeed, were accessed while ByteDance employees were investigating possible leaks from employees to the press, the company said. The employees involved, two based in the United States and two in China, were fired following an investigation conducted on behalf of the company by an outside law firm, the CEOs of TikTok and ByteDance revealed on Thursday in the employees in two separate emails.

The personal data accessed from the journalists’ accounts included IP addresses, according to the spokesperson. IP addresses can provide information about a user’s location.

“The people involved misused their authority to gain access to TikTok’s user data,” Shou, TikTok’s CEO. Chew said in his email to employees, according to an excerpt of the email reviewed by CNN. “This is unacceptable.”

Disclosure could further inflame scrutiny TikTok faces national security concerns in the United States given its ties in China US lawmakers have raised concerns about the security of user data and the ability of the company’s Chinese employees to access information about US TikTok users.

Criticism mounted earlier this year after a BuzzFeed News report said that some US user data has been repeatedly accessed from China and quoted an employee who allegedly said that “everything is seen in China”. TikTok, meanwhile, has confirmed that some employees in China can access US user data, but the company says a US-based security team decides who can access US user data from china

In October, Forbes reported that ByteDance planned to use TikTok data to spy on certain US citizens. In a report Thursday, Forbes named three journalists who had been tracked by the company. (TikTok declined to comment on whether a third reporter had been affected.) The New York Times also reported that several of the reporters’ contacts at TikTok had also been caught up in the tracking, which the company declined to confirm.

“The misconduct of these individuals, who no longer work at ByteDance, was an abuse of their authority to gain access to user data,” Oberwetter said in a statement Thursday. “This bad behavior is unacceptable and is not in line with our efforts at TikTok to earn the trust of our users.”

In response to the incident, TikTok said it has restructured its internal audit and risk teams and removed access to US user data for those teams, according to the spokesperson. “We take data security very seriously and will continue to improve our access protocols, which have already been significantly improved and tightened since this incident took place,” Oberwetter said.

The Financial Times said that “spying on journalists, interfering with their work or intimidating their sources is completely unacceptable. We will investigate this story further before deciding our formal response,” according to a statement included in a report by the newspaper.

A spokesperson for BuzzFeed said in a statement to CNN that it is “deeply disturbed” by the disclosure, calling it a “flagrant disregard for the privacy and rights of journalists as well as TikTok users.”

“It’s even more troubling that this comes on the heels of a series of reports by BuzzFeed News that exposed major problems at its parent company, from employees accessing US user data from China to attempts of ByteDance to push pro-China messages to Americans.” the BuzzFeed spokesperson said.

More than a dozen states, including Maryland, South Dakota and Texas, have announced TikTok bans for state employees on government-issued devices in recent weeks, and a small but growing number of universities are also blocking the access to TikTok on school-owned devices. or WiFi networks. The Senate earlier this week passed a bill to ban TikTok from all US government devices. And a trio of lawmakers have introduced legislation aimed at banning the short-form video app from operating in the United States.

TikTok is currently engaged in long-running negotiations with the US government over a potential settlement to address national security concerns and allow the app to continue serving US customers. It has also said it has taken steps to isolate US user data from other parts of its business, including through a partnership with US-based Oracle.

“No matter what the cause or result was, this misguided investigation seriously violated the company’s code of conduct and is condemned by the company,” said Rubo, ByteDance’s CEO. Liang said in Thursday’s email to employees. “We simply cannot take integrity risks that damage the trust of our users, employees and stakeholders.”