ByteDance Fires TikTok Employees Accessing US Journalist Data ILLevitably

Republican Senator Marco Rubio is increasingly convinced to ban TikTok. (photo: Twitter @marcorubio)

JAKARTA - ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok in China announced on Thursday December 22 that some employees had incorrectly accessed TikTok user data from two journalists. They are no longer employed by the company. This is known from an email seen by Reuters.

ByteDance employees accessed the data as part of their efforts to investigate the company's information leak earlier this year. They want to identify potential links between two journalists, former BuzzFeed reporter and Financial Times reporter, and company employee, Erich Andersen said in an email from ByteDance.

The employee saw the IP address of journalists trying to find out if they were in the same location as employees suspected of leaking classified information.

The disclosure, previously reported by the New York Times, could add to the pressure TikTok is facing in Washington from lawmakers and Joe Biden's administration on security concerns about user data in the US.

A source also said four ByteDance employees involved in the incident were fired, including two in China and two in the United States. Company officials say they are taking additional steps to protect user data.

Congress will pass a law this week banning US government employees from downloading or using TikTok on their government-owned devices and more than a dozen governors have also banned state employees in the US from using TikTok on state-owned devices.

The Financial Times said in a statement that "satiscing journalists, is disturbing their work or intimidating their sources, completely unacceptable. We will investigate this story more fully before deciding our formal response."

BuzzFeed News spokeswoman totaling Grams said the company was deeply disturbed by the report, saying it showed "discriminate trust in the privacy and rights of journalists and TikTok users."

Forbes reported last Thursday that ByteDance had tracked down several Forbes journalists including some who previously worked at BuzzFeed "as part of a secret surveillance campaign" aimed at finding the source of the leak.

Randall Lane, Forbes chief content officer, called it "a direct attack on the idea of press freedom and its critical role in the function of democracy."

TikTok's chief executive, Shou Zi▁hukum, explained in a separate email to employees seen by Reuters that "such a violation does not at all represent the principles of our company."

"The company will continue to improve this access protocol, which has been significantly improved and strengthened since this initiative was carried out," said law.

Chew said that over the past 15 months TikTok has been working to build US TikTok Data Security (USDS) to ensure protected US TikTok user data remains in the United States.

"We are finalizing the migration of protected US user data management to the USDS department and have systematically cut off access lines," he wrote.

ByteDance also said it was restructuring its Internal Audit and Risk Control department, and the global investigative function would be separated and restructured.

The US government's foreign investment committee (CFIUS), a national security agency, has been working for months to reach a national security deal with ByteDance to protect data on more than 100 million US TikTok users, but there seems to be no deal to be reached before the end of the year.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio said about the incident, that ByteDance "strongly wants to allay growing bipartisan concerns about how it will allow the Chinese Communist Party to use - and potentially arm - American citizen data. "Every day it is becoming increasingly clear that we need to ban TikTok," Rubio said.