The company behind Tiktok fires employees: Has inappropriately snooped on user data

Bytedance, Tiktok’s Chinese parent company, has fired four employees after an internal investigation conducted by an external law firm revealed that they had “inappropriately” accessed data on several American users. Here among two journalists.

It writes New York Times.

According to the newspaper, Bytedance conducted an internal investigation earlier this year after confidential information was in the press.

The purpose of the investigation was actually to find employees who had leaked the information to a number of journalists.

But during the investigation, the company discovered that several employees had accessed data about the journalists to whom data had been leaked.

The Tiktok employees allegedly tried to find signs of whether the journalists in question had been close to employees at TikTok, and according to the New York Times they therefore obtained the journalists’ IP address and what is described as “other data”.

The CEO is deeply disappointed.

According to the New York Times, Bytedance CEO Rubo Liang has sent an email to the group’s employees, in which he is disappointed by the employees who have been fired. He writes that they have helped to undermine the public’s trust in the company.

“I was deeply disappointed when I was informed about the situation, and I’m sure you feel the same way,” he writes in the email.

Rubo Liang also writes:

“The public trust that we have worked so hard to build will now be significantly undermined because of the wrongdoing of a few.”

The case comes after Tiktok, especially in the United States, has faced headwinds. According to the news agency Reuters, the American state recently introduced a ban on government employees having Tiktok installed on their work phone.

In addition, it has also been promoted that Chinese Tiktok employees also have access to data about European users.