American journalists who wrote on the company, close to the Chinese Communist Party, already revealed these practices in October. The US Congress could prohibit the use of Tiktok to all its elected officials.
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Tiktok’s parent company is at the heart of a new controversy. The Chinese company of new technologies bytedance admitted, Friday, December 23, that some of its employees had, wrongly, access to data from the Tiktok platform to track journalists to identify the sources originally of media information leaks.
These employees have particularly had access to the data of two journalists who wrote on the company. They hoped to identify links between Bytedance staff and a journalist from the Financial Times as well as a former Buzzfeed journalist, according to an email from the general councilor of Bytedance, Erich Andersen, seen by the France-Presse agency.
The two journalists have covered affairs related to this company through information obtained confidentially. The employees identified by Bytedance as having been in contact with these journalists no longer work for the company, said Andersen, without giving more details on the total number of employees in this case.
The IP addresses of journalists were obtained, to determine if they were in the same place as the people of Bytedance suspected of having disclosed confidential information, showed an internal report transmitted by Mr. Andersen.
practices revealed earlier
In October, journalists from the American media Forbes already revealed these targeted espionage practices at Bytedance. “In October, I discovered (…) that Bytedance planned to draw my physical position, just like that of my colleagues,” writes Emily Baker-White, journalist at Forbes, passed by Buzzfeed, in a tweet Thursday. “We couldn’t reveal everything, to protect our sources,” she continues. Two months later, she persists and signs with an investigation bringing the tracing of certain journalists from the American magazine who wrote on the Chinese company.
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This scandal comes as the American political class agrees with a boycott from Tiktok. Congress elected officials wish to prohibit the platform on civil servants’ devices due to national security threats. After the Senate, the House of Representatives could also adopt a text prohibiting the download and use of the application on the professional equipment of US federal state employees. Nearly twenty states have already taken the plunge and took similar measures for their own employees.
a damaged image
Tiktok has taken several measures to try to convince the American authorities that the data of American users of the platform were protected, in particular by storing them on servers located in the United States. But he admitted that employees established in China had access to this data, even if it was done, according to him, in a strict and limited framework.
This information undermines the image that the social network strives to assert with customers and governments: that of a platform concerned with the protection of data from its users and respectful of national security .
Because Tiktok criticisms are concerned that this data is accessible to the parent company of the platform, the Chinese group bytedance, theoretically subject to the control of the Chinese Communist Party.