Reclaim The Net
Highlighting the privacy concerns many have raised about the social media app.
ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of popular social media app TikTok, has admitted that some of its employees used the app to improperly obtain the Internet Protocol (IP) address of two United States (US) journalists and used this data to monitor their physical location.
User IP addresses are transmitted to apps, websites, and other online services whenever users connect to them. By default, this IP address will reveal the geolocation of the user.
ByteDance made the admission after performing an internal investigation and said that Emily Baker-White, a former BuzzFeed reporter who now works at Forbes, and Cristina Criddle, a Financial Times reporter, were surveilled. ByteDance also admitted that “a small number of people connected to the reporters” had their data improperly accessed. Forbes reported that two of its other reporters who formerly worked at BuzzFeed News, Katharine Schwab and Richard Nieva, were also tracked.
