Amidst the growing distrust of the US government toward TikTok, internal investigations within ByteDance revealed that several employees accessed the TikTok user data of US journalists. Two of the employees worked in the US while the two others were based in China.
Was It an Isolated Incident?
According to TikTok's CEO Shou Chew, the incident was a "poorly conceived acts of a few people," which implies that the unwarranted data access of the US journalists' data was the employees' action alone.
The four employees who have already been fired accessed the journalists' data, which included their IP addresses. The purpose was to determine if they were near TikTok employees suspected of providing information to the press, as mentioned in The Verge.
This will be a huge setback for TikTok, seeing as they are trying to assure US government officials that US citizens' personal data is securely stored and not shared. Rubo Liang, CEO of ByteDance, expressed his disappointment in the matter.
Liang stated that the misconduct of a few individuals would significantly undermine the public trust they have been trying to build. To make amends, the company's Internet Audit and Risk team are already being restructured since the incident was conducted by them.
As mentioned in the New York Times, the reporters targeted by the employees were Emily Baker-White who works for Forbes, and Cristina Criddle who wrote for Financial Times. Reports say that the employees also accessed other US TikTok user data.
How Bad Is It?
Considering that TikTok has denied that it accessed data from US citizens many times, the incident may be grounds for the government to move forward with banning the platform. TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan has already addressed the issue before.
She said that TikTok only accessed approximate location data based on the users; IP addresses. Shanahan reasoned that it helped show relevant content and ads to users, as well as detect and prevent fraud, as mentioned in Forbes.
TikTok even started using Oracle, which is based in Silicon Valley, as the cloud storage for US data. This was in response to the US government's concerns about the company leaking information to the Chinese government.
This was part of the company's efforts to systematically cut off access points from China. TikTok CEO Shou Chew expressed that they take data security incredibly seriously. The company also plans to delete all historical data that is stored outside of the Oracle cloud system.
Several states have already banned TikTok from government-owned devices. Senator Mark Warner is already eager to conclude the negotiations that the administration has with TikTok, saying that Congress might be forced to step in soon if a solution has not been presented.
Senator Marco Rubio, a member of the Intelligence Committee, said that no one should be surprised or fooled by the apology issued by ByteDance. Rubio is among the officials who support the ban of TikTok from all devices.
