Spying on journalists, illegal surveillance and “heavy-duty” interrogations of its own employees: TikTok’s internal security team looked dangerously like secret police. who had full powers.
This is another bad publicity stunt for the Chinese social network TikTok: its parent company ByteDance had an internal security team that carried out real “police” interrogations and other investigations on… its own employees. After spying on journalists and being under investigation by the FBI, the favorite teen video service is feeling the pinch again following revelations about its inner workings.
More particularly a cell called “Internal Audit and Risk Control”, or Internal Audit and Risk Control. Far from being a Chinese division, this cell was made up of former American and European law enforcement officials (police, etc.). The problem being that this team, which exists in different forms in most similar large companies, was invested with near absolute powers.
The TikTok saga of recent months
Read also : TikTok monitors everything you type, including your passwords (August 2022)
Read also : TikTok makes a shocking revelation about your personal data (November 2022)
Read also : TikTok: the success of the social network worries the FBI (November 2022)
Read also : TikTok admits it: several of its employees have spied on American citizens (December 2022)
Read also : TikTok admits to highlighting some videos at the expense of others (January)
Powers that have allowed abuses in contradiction to all Western laws: surveillance of emails without the knowledge of human resources services, “intense” interrogations, etc. All this on both American and European territory. A Berlin employee, Charles Bahr, having indeed paid the price for nine months of witch-hunting with “several dozen interviews by former law enforcement officials”. Who had the flavors of real police interrogations.
A fear from within
Far from wanting to steal state or industrial secrets, we perceive at TikoTok, as much in the surveillance of journalists as of its employees, a desire for internal control. The Semafor article that echoes this news indeed highlights several frauds and scandals of Chinese employees who took advantage of their positions at ByteDance/TikTok. From the consultation of personal data to corruption cases aimed at highlighting content, internal abuses scare the company. In particular because they are commonplace in China: in the same article, our colleague recalls that the giant Tencent announced that it had fired several dozen employees last January for stealing clothes originally intended for videos.
The result is that the Chinese management has given its blank check to the Internal Audit and Risk Control team. Who mixed the worst of Chinese paranoia with the police methods of the former members of the security forces who compose it – with interrogations sometimes lasting up to 90 minutes! ByteDance obviously swears and promises that its security team will be split in two and better supervised. But that’s not going to stop him from continuing to have problems.
TikTok in the sights of the USA… and the French Senate
These dysfunctions worthy of the novels of the Soviet secret police very legitimately attracted bad articles against TikTok… And the concerns and investigations of government bodies. There are FBI pre-investigations, local bans in various US states (ban on installation on government terminals, service blockages on Wi-Fi, etc.) and the risk of a federal investigation relating to the use of Americans’ personal data – especially since ByteDance is a Chinese company.
This concern is also experienced by us, since the French Senate today announced the creation of a commission of inquiry senatorial on the operation of TikTok. No labor law, but, as for American parliamentarians, concerns and suspicions around non-compliance with data protection. TikTok may be the social network that has the wind in its sails, it is also the one that is most in the sights of Western authorities…
Semafor
