TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, used TikTok to track the locations of Forbes reporters.
22.12. 23:53
Chinese ByteDance, the parent company of the TikTok video application, admits that the company used TikTok to monitor journalists from the American business magazine Forbes. The matter was resolved in the company’s internal investigation and reported on Forbeswho has seen ByteDance’s documents.
ByteDance employees used TikTok to track the location of Forbes reporters writing about it. These gained access to the IP addresses and user data of the journalists in order to find out if the journalists had been in the same locations as the ByteDance employees.
With the follow-up, ByteDance sought to find out who had leaked information about TikTok’s ties to China.
Also news agency Reuters reports that it has seen an email message in which ByteDance admits to having spied on two Forbes journalists.
According to internal emails seen by Forbes, several ByteDance employees had also obtained the user data of a former BuzzFeed reporter and a Financial Times reporter through those TikTok accounts.
Forbes is already before told ByteDance planned to track certain US users. Monitoring was conducted from China.
ByteDance and TikTok did not deny spying to Forbes, but claimed on their Twitter account that TikTok has “never” been used to target “members of the US administration, activists, public figures or journalists”.
In the company’s internal e-mails, the CEO of ByteDance Rubo Liang however, according to Forbes, admitted that TikTok had been used exactly as alleged.
of the United States this week, Congress is to ban the country’s government employees from downloading TikTok to their work phones, Reuters reports.
Democratic Senator Mark Warner commented to Forbes that the latest twists confirm concerns that TikTok executives in China have repeatedly had access to the private information of US users. According to Warner, the US Department of Justice has promised for a year to find ways to protect US users from ByteDance and the Chinese government.
Also in Finland, an information security expert has recommended deleting the application. HS told in August tracking code, which can monitor all keystrokes a user makes on the TikTok site, including passwords and credit card information and individual taps such as opening links. The risk especially applies to the TikTok application on Apple devices.
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