TikTok Owner Admits Employees Accessed Data of U.S. Users and Journalists

ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, admitted this week that a few of its employees, some based in China, accessed TikTok data of U.S. users and two journalists when conducting an investigation trying to snuff out the source of a damning leak.

According to a report, the CEO of TikTok admitted the overreach in a memo. A Forbes investigation earlier this year alleged that the company planned to use the TikTok app to track users in the U.S. Several employees accessed ID addresses and other personal data from a pair of reporters and an unknown number of U.S. users who they were in contact with. The leaker hunters were trying to find out if the users were near the employees. Those efforts didn't work.

The misuse of their authority to get access to user data was an egregious misuse of their authority. The behavior is not in line with our efforts to earn the trust of our users. Since this incident took place, our access protocols have been greatly improved, and we will continue to do so.

According to The New York Times, ByteDance fired all of the employees who accessed the U.S. users' data. Two of those employees were based in China while the other two were based in the U.S.

The public trust that we have spent a lot of money on is going to be undermined by a few individuals.

The findings came around six months after a report that said US user data has been accessed from China. Engineers had access to U.S. user data for five months.

The lawmaker who wants to restrict TikTok's access will most likely try to use the latest overreaches to argue for new legislation. A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers introduced a bill last week that would ban TikTok from operating in the US.