TikTok Privacy Investigation Confirms It Spied On Journalists, As U.S. Ban Becomes More Likely
TikTok's parent company ByteDance has confirmed previous claims that it secretly accessed some journalists' data, stating that it fired the employees who were allegedly responsible for the privacy breach. The findings, which were the result of an internal investigation at ByteDance, were shared with company employees in an email, according to The New York Times. The debacle started back in June 2022 when BuzzFeed News reported findings from dozens of pieces of leaked internal audio recordings, claiming that they revealed ByteDance employees located in China had "repeatedly accessed nonpublic data" about TikTok users located in the United States.
The disclosure is no doubt bad news for TikTok, which has faced years of government scrutiny in the U.S. over the alleged national security risks it may present. At the time of the initial report, ByteDance had claimed that it wasn't possible for user data to be accessed in the way BuzzFeed had claimed, but the new disclosure proves that such claims aren't true. The news is likely to further spur politicians into action, particularly now that state governments have already taken the step of banning TikTok from government-issued devices and it looks like something similar may happen soon at the federal level.
The U.S. government has called TikTok a security threat for years
According to Forbes, ByteDance kicked off an internal investigation following news about the leaked internal audio, which included recordings of meetings at TikTok. Forbes says that it has reviewed internal documents from the parent company, and they allegedly reveal that ByteDance's Chief Security and Privacy Office was behind the effort, called Project Raven, to figure out which employees were leaking info to the press.
This wasn't a rogue group acting under the radar, according to Forbes, which claims that the head of global compliance at TikTok was aware of the effort. As well, ByteDance employees in China reportedly were aware of Project Raven and had given it approval. The privacy intrusion, which happened during the hunt for the leakers, impacted three Forbes journalists who had previously worked for BuzzFeed News, as well as a Financial Times reporter and a small group of people who are said to have been in some way connected with the targeted journalists.
A few employees were fired as a result of the data access, including one in China and another in the United States, as well as TikTok Chief Internal Auditor Chris Lepitak. However, any reassurances from the company in regard to its privacy practices are even less likely to appease regulators in light of this development, and the concerns continue to cover more than just alleged data intrusions. Federal officials in the U.S. have likewise expressed concerns that TikTok, due to its parent company ByteDance's presence in China, could be leveraged to manipulate users by deliberately skewing the kind of content they see — something Facebook demonstrated as very effective with its controversial mood study.