TikTok Spied on Forbes Journalists
Emily Baker-White, reporting for Forbes:
An internal investigation by ByteDance, the parent company of
video-sharing platform TikTok, found that employees tracked
multiple journalists covering the company, improperly gaining
access to their IP addresses and user data in an attempt to
identify whether they had been in the same locales as ByteDance
employees.According to materials reviewed by Forbes, ByteDance tracked
multiple Forbes journalists as part of this covert surveillance
campaign, which was designed to unearth the source of leaks inside
the company following a drumbeat of stories
exposing the company’s ongoing links to China. As a
result of the investigation into the surveillance tactics,
ByteDance fired Chris Lepitak, its chief internal auditor who led
the team responsible for them. The China-based executive Song Ye,
who Lepitak reported to and who reports directly to ByteDance CEO
Rubo Liang, resigned. […]Forbes first reported the surveillance tactics, which were
overseen by a China-based team at ByteDance, in October. Asked for
comment on that story, ByteDance and TikTok did not deny the
surveillance, but took to Twitter after the story was
published to say that “TikTok has never been used to ‘target’ any
members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or
journalists,” and that “TikTok could not monitor U.S. users in the
way the article suggested.” In the internal email, Liang
acknowledged that TikTok had been used in exactly this way, as
Forbes had reported.
I feel like I’m shouting into the void on this issue, but I will reiterate that Chinese-owned internet services should be banned in the United States, and TikTok exemplifies why. Just ban it.
