ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, said Thursday that an internal investigation found that employees improperly obtained the data of US TikTok users, including that of two reporters.
Over the summer, some employees of a ByteDance team responsible for monitoring employee behavior tried to find the sources of suspected leaks of internal conversations and business documents to journalists. In addition, the employees were given access to the IP addresses and other data of two reporters and a small number of people who were connected to the reporters via their TikTok accounts. They were trying to determine if those individuals were near ByteDance employees, the company said, adding that the efforts couldn’t find any leaks.
The investigation was launched after an article was published by Forbes, and the investigation corroborates part of that report and highlights the privacy and security risks of TikTok that US lawmakers, governors and the administrations of Trump and Biden have raised for more than two years. set. More than a dozen states have banned TikTok from government-issued devices, and the company is in lengthy negotiations with the government over security and privacy measures that would block any potential access to US user data by ByteDance and the Chinese government.
ByteDance’s general counsel, Erich Andersen, revealed the findings of the investigation, which was conducted by an outside law firm, in an email to employees on Thursday.
All four employees involved in the scheme were fired, the company said, correcting a previous statement that one of the four had resigned. Two of those employees worked in China and two in the United States. ByteDance said it restructured its internal audit and risk team and removed all access to US data from that department.
The targeted reporters were Emily Baker-White, who wrote for BuzzFeed and now works at Forbes, and Cristina Criddle of the Financial Times, ByteDance said, though it declined to identify other affected TikTok users. Forbes reported that two more of its reporters, who are also former BuzzFeed reporters, were targeted. ByteDance said the investigation did not conclude those additional reporters were affected, but said it would re-examine the raw data to determine if the allegations were true.
Mr. Andersen and ByteDance CEO Rubo Liang announced the findings of the investigation in separate emails to employees.
“I was deeply disappointed when I was made aware of the situation…and I am sure you feel the same way,” Mr. Liang. “The public trust that we have built up tremendously will be significantly undermined by the misconduct of a few individuals.”
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew also sent an email to his associates about the investigation, expressing his disappointment and emphasizing the company’s commitment to protecting US data.
“We take data security incredibly seriously,” said Mr. Chew in the email. He said the company had been working for the past 15 months to create a new US-based data storage program as “proof of that commitment”.
According to ByteDance and TikTok officials, the employees obtained historical data. The company said it had been working for several months to move all US data into the Oracle cloud, but past data obtained by ByteDance employees was still available. TikTok said it planned to delete all historical data outside of the Oracle systems.
The revelations come amid growing concerns from US officials about the privacy and national security risks posed by TikTok, a hugely popular video-sharing app with an estimated 100 million US users. ByteDance bought TikTok, formerly known as Musical.ly, in 2017. Since then, the company has been the focus of national security officials who say the app is too closely aligned with its parent company in China and sensitive data, such as geolocation and people’s habits and interests. users in the United States, owned by the Chinese government.
In September, TikTok’s chief operating officer, Vanessa Pappas, testified at a Senate hearing that the app did not share any data with the Chinese government. The company has tried to distance itself from ByteDance’s app, saying that TikTok has its own corporate structure, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Singapore and Washington.
Hoping to allay national security fears, ByteDance moved US users’ data to a cloud storage system operated by the Silicon Valley software company Oracle.
TikTok is in negotiations with the Biden administration over that security plan to move all US data and erect walls around the data to prevent access by the Chinese government. Negotiations, which began during the Trump administration, have stalled in recent weeks, sparking a cascade of state and federal actions to restrict TikTok use. Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and chairman of the intelligence committee, called on the government to wrap up its talks with TikTok about national security solutions for the app.
“This new development reinforces serious concerns that the social media platform TikTok has enabled engineers and executives in the People’s Republic of China to repeatedly access private data of US users, despite repeated claims to lawmakers and users that this data was protected,” said Warner. . “It’s time to come forward with that solution or Congress could soon be forced to intervene.”
Congress will vote as early as this week on a proposal that would ban TikTok from all federally issued devices. Intelligence officials, including FBI Director Christopher Wray, have warned that Chinese officials may siphon sensitive data on American citizens for use in surveillance and propaganda.
TikTok is in the middle of an escalating economic and trade war between the United States and China for technology leadership. The superpowers have imposed trade restrictions on foreign-made technologies and poured hundreds of billions of dollars into grants and subsidies to bring tech manufacturing supply chains back within their borders.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a senior member of the Intelligence Committee, has introduced legislation with Democratic support that would ban TikTok from all consumer devices. The bill should stand up to the First Amendment, legal experts say, but highlights mounting pressure to ban the app.
“No one should be surprised or fooled by ByteDance’s public apology,” Rubio said in a statement about the internal investigation. “The company is desperate to address growing bipartisan concerns about how it will enable the Chinese Communist Party to use — and possibly weaponize — the data of American citizens. Every day it becomes clearer that we should ban TikTok.”
