TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, which is linked to the Chinese Communist Party, admitted this week that it used data from the app to track down and spy on several US journalists who produced reports on TikTok’s presence in China. The information is from the magazine forbes. While ByteDance interpreted this as an isolated incident carried out without permission by rogue employees, the ByteDance report forbes indicates otherwise.
The news reveals that TikTok has continually released false information about its spy campaign to the public and in at least one meeting with US Congressional officials this year. No one on TikTok has resigned or been fired after admitting what happened.
The spying involved tracking the locations of Emily Baker-White, Katherine Schwab and Richard Nieva of the forbesin addition to Cristina Criddle, from Financial Timeswith the aim of identifying the TikTok employees who leaked information to these journalists.
ByteDance leadership sent emails to employees on Thursday, claiming that four employees — two in the U.S. and two in China — attempted to identify the team members responsible for the leaks, which revealed that employees in China could access the data. of US users. Previously, TikTok had stated that such access to US data from China was impossible.
Although emails from ByteDance executives, including CEO Rubo Liang, stated that only four former employees were responsible for surveilling US journalists, the ByteDance report forbes indicates that, in fact, ByteDance leaders were also aware of the spying campaign.
Company spokeswoman Jennifer Banks told Forbes that the investigation found that ByteDance investigated only Baker-White, but internal documents from the publication prove that Schwab and Nieva were also spied on.
The spokeswoman also stated that ByteDance’s head of global legal compliance, Catherine Razzano, only learned of the spying campaign in late October – but according to forbes Razzano was aware of this before that time. In addition, the spying involved the head of the company’s security and privacy department, as well as Razzano.
According to the forbesByteDance started the spying campaign after Baker-White reported for the BuzzFeed in June revealing that employees in China can access US user data.
While Forbes reported in October that ByteDance planned to track the location of US users, TikTok has vehemently — and falsely — denied the allegations in public and also behind closed doors during at least one meeting with congressional officials.
After the October story, TikTok wrote on Twitter claiming that the reports from the forbes “continue to lack journalistic rigor and integrity”. The tweets falsely claimed that “TikTok has never ‘targeted’ any member of the US government, activities, public figures or journalists.”
TikTok staff also made false statements about the ability of Chinese officials to spy on the app’s US users at a September meeting with congressional staff, according to two Republican Party lawmakers, James Comer and Cathy McMorris Rodgers. At the next Congress, they are expected to launch polls on TikTok as the likely next chairs of the Oversight Committee and the Energy and Commerce Committee, respectively.
After the report of forbes in October, they wrote a letter to TikTok CEO Shou Chew, stating that it appears “the company has shared potentially false or misleading information with the Committee’s bipartisan staff,” since TikTok claimed at the meeting that employees in China could not access location data of US users.
This week’s revelations are likely to spur more congressional action — beyond the expected passage of a bill to ban the app from government devices — and potentially shape the Biden administration’s dealings with TikTok’s leadership regarding the company’s future in the US. Earlier this month, Representatives Mike Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi and Senator Marco Rubio introduced a bill that would ban TikTok and ByteDance from operating in the country.
Some Democratic lawmakers who supported banning TikTok from government devices had previously worried that the new bipartisan proposal for a full ban would jeopardize the Biden administration’s ongoing negotiations with TikTok. These negotiations could result in a data security agreement that would potentially allow the app to remain in the US.
Senator Mark Warner, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has previously said he would likely wait for the administration to act before supporting Rubio’s proposal. In light of yesterday’s revelations, however, that appears to have changed. He indicated in a statement to the forbes that your patience is running out:
“This new development reinforces serious concerns that the social media platform allowed engineers and executives of TikTok in the People’s Republic of China to repeatedly access private data of US users, despite repeated allegations made to lawmakers and users that this data was protected. The Department of Justice has also been promising for over a year that it is looking at ways to protect US users’ data from Bytedance and the Chinese Communist Party – it’s time to come up with that solution or Congress could be forced to intervene soon.”
©2022 National Review. Published with permission. original in English.
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