In the midst of a moment of tension between China and the United States and just when the North American giant has several eyes on TikTokByteDance, the parent company of the social network, admitted that some of its employees improperly accessed data from US users and two journalists.
Some of these ByteDance workers were in China spying on US netizens and the two reporters. According to the report of The New York Times quoted on the website of computer todaythese improper accesses occurred after an investigation to try to discover the origin of a leak.
Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok, would have admitted the espionage case in a memo sent to employees to which Bloomberg had access.
ByteDance had been internally investigating since January of this year an accusation that the company planned to use the TikTok app to track the location of certain US users.
What did ByteDance find?
The ByteDance investigation found that four employees accessed identifying addresses and other personal data from a couple of reporters from BuzzFeed News and the Financial Times and from an unknown number of US users with whom they were in contact.
BuzzFeed was the one to publish the report citing leaked audio from TikTok meetings confirming that, repeatedly, members of the company accessed user data in the US for five monthsexactly between September 2021 and January 2022.
The TikTok spokesperson explained to The New York Times in an email: “The misconduct of certain individuals, who are no longer employed by ByteDance, was an egregious abuse of their authority to gain access to user data.”.
According to the aforementioned media, ByteDance fired the four workers who accessed the data of users in the United States. The company has restructured its internal audit team and removed the department’s access to US data, but executives fear the damage has already been done.
