Employees of the Chinese technology company ByteDance improperly accessed private data of the social network TikTok, a subsidiary of the group, to track journalists and locate the origin of leaks to the media, the firm acknowledged on Friday.
TikTok went to great lengths to convince users and governments in major markets like the United States that it protected data privacy and did not pose a threat to national security.
But parent company ByteDance told AFP on Friday that several employees had accessed the data of two journalists as part of an internal investigation into company media leaks.
The aim was to identify links between the staff and a Financial Times reporter and a former BuzzFeed journalist, according to an email from ByteDance general counsel Erich Andersen, seen by AFP.
Both journalists had reported on the content of leaked company documents.
In a statement to AFP, ByteDance condemned the “misguided initiative that seriously violated the company’s code of conduct.”
The employees had obtained the IP addresses of the reporters to determine if they coincided in any location with their ByteDance colleagues suspected of leaking the information, according to Andersen.
The plan didn’t work, in part because IP addresses only reveal approximate geolocations.
In any case, Andersen explained in his email that none of the workers implicated in the case were still at ByteDance, although he did not detail how many were fired.
TikTok is back in the spotlight in the United States as Congress seeks to nationwide ban the use of this popular short-video platform on government devices for security reasons.
The social network has tried to convince the US authorities that the data in that country is protected and stored on servers located within its territory.
But after some press reports, he also admitted that employees in China had access to US user data, theoretically under strict and very limited circumstances.