American journalists were spied on through Tiktok, Chinese company ByteDance itself agreed; fired 4 employees

new Delhi: An important information has come to light regarding ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of the popular video app Tick Talk. Some employees of ByteDance spied on American journalists. ByteDance itself has admitted that some of its employees improperly accessed the data of two American journalists who were TikTok users during the summer season this year. However, those employees are no longer part of the company, as the company has fired them. Four employees of ByteDance were involved in this espionage scandal. This has been revealed in the report of news agency Reuters.

In a report by news agency Reuters, it has been said that ByteDance employees accessed the data of two American journalists earlier this year as part of a failed attempt to investigate the company’s information leak. The purpose of accessing the data during the company’s information leak investigation was to identify possible connections between the BuzzFeed reporter, the Financial Times reporter and company employees, and to determine how internal information was leaked. are.

The report states that ByteDance employees tried to track the journalists’ IP addresses to see if they were at the same location from where employees suspected the leak of confidential information. The New York Times had also disclosed earlier about accessing the data of journalists. Now this disclosure may increase the pressure on Tiktok from lawmakers and the Biden administration in Washington due to security concerns about American user data.

A person with knowledge of the matter told that four ByteDance employees involved in this incident of accessing the data of American journalists have been expelled from the company. Two of these were Chinese and two were American. The company said that it is taking additional steps to protect users’ data. Tiktok chief executive Shou Chi Chew said in a separate email to employees that this type of abuse is completely against the company’s principles.

After the report of this espionage case came to the fore, government employees in America have been prohibited from using Tiktok on government mobiles or other devices. Congress is set to pass legislation this week to ban US government employees from downloading or using TikTok on their government-owned devices, and more than a dozen governors have banned state employees from using government devices, according to reports. Banned from using Tiktok.

At the same time, the Financial Times said in a statement that spying on reporters, interfering with their work or threatening their sources is completely unacceptable. We will thoroughly investigate this story before deciding on our formal response. At the same time, BuzzFeed News spokesperson Lizzy Grams said that this incident is a gross violation of the privacy and rights of Tiktok users as well as journalists. In addition, Forbes also reported on Thursday that ByteDance had tracked several Forbes journalists.

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Tags: America, Data leak, TikTok, TikTok Video