China’s ByteDance finds staff inappropriately gained access to TikTok user data in US
- One person has resigned and three were fired after the parent firm’s investigation showed some individuals had misused their authority to gain access to personal data
- ByteDance’s internal audit team has also been restructured in an effort to avoid similar violations in the future
TikTok parent company ByteDance found that some employees inappropriately gained access to data of some American users, complicating the Chinese technology giant’s already-fraught efforts to convince US lawmakers that its app is secure.
“The individuals involved misused their authority to obtain access to TikTok user data,” Chew Shou Zi, chief executive of the popular mobile video-sharing app, told employees in a memo viewed by Bloomberg.
The data access stemmed from an internal ByteDance investigation launched over the summer to discover the source of employee leaks to the press.
Members of ByteDance’s internal audit team responsible for the investogation accessed the personal data from some journalists’ accounts, including internet protocol addresses, to try to determine whether they interacted with TikTok employees, according to a second email sent on Thursday by TikTok general counsel Erich Andersen.
Beijing-based ByteDance launched a separate investigation after a Forbes story claimed that the company's employees planned to use the TikTok app to track the physical location of some US users. That second investigation, conducted by an outside law firm, discovered the inappropriate access to personal user data, according to Andersen’s email, which was seen by Bloomberg.