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TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. said Thursday that its employees improperly accessed the user data of two journalists on the social media service, according to several emails sent by company leaders to employees on Thursday.
Employees misused their authority to access the data of journalists in an effort to identify leaks of confidential company information, General Counsel Erich Andersen wrote in an email to employees on Thursday. Andersen described the improper access of user data as “a misguided plan” that looked at the IP addresses of the journalists “to determine if they were in the same location as the employees suspected of leaking confidential information.”
The journalists are described by Andersen as a former BuzzFeed reporter and a Financial Times reporter, but they are otherwise not identified. The employees, part of the company’s Audit and Risk Control department, didn’t discover the sources of the leaks, he said.
TikTok has been engulfed in controversy for more than two years over concerns from U.S. lawmakers, regulators and officials in the Trump and Biden administrations about national security risks related to data use and storage for TikTok. The company has sought to resolve the issue by taking steps to separate itself structurally from its parent company, as well as through promises to store U.S. data within the country.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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