The Chinese social network wanted to find out which of its employees had spoken with the press.
To find which employees were giving information about the company to the press, TikTok had decided to use drastic measures. Or rather to dig into the personal data at his disposal. In a testimony given at the BBC English, the journalist of Financial Times Cristina Criddle indicates that she received a call from the Chinese social network informing her that several of its employees, in China and the United States, had analyzed her personal data, in particular her geolocation.
Except that Cristina Criddle does not have her own TikTok account with her name, but one with the image of her cat. The account, with a hundred subscribers, only lists videos of her cat, and no video of the journalist.
Recorded IP addresses
The employees identified by Bytedance (parent company of TikTok) as being at the origin of this personal data breach would have acted as part of an internal audit, in order to find the employees speaking to the press. The objective was then to compare the IP addresses recorded for Cristina Criddle and those of the employees in order to find out who had been able to meet the journalist. Objective not fulfilled since at the end of the investigation, no “culprit” could be found.
TikTok and Bytedance apologized to the reporter, saying it would “never happen again”. Already last December, several journalists, including one also at the Financial Timeshad been spied on by employees of the Chinese social network, always with the same desire to identify sources.
This new case still risks damaging the image of TikTok, which has wanted for several months to get rid of its bad reputation in terms of respect for personal data. Accused of espionage by many institutions, such as in France or the United States, the application worries above all by its scale on the whole globe. TikTok claims more than a billion active monthly users worldwide, including 150 million in Europe, and more than 20 million in France.
