Digital rights group calls TikTok ‘dangerous’ due to explosive hacker revelations

Digital rights activists have called Chinese-owned TikTok “dangerous” after the app’s parent company was revealed to have abused access to journalists’ data, amid growing support in the US for legislation to shut down the platform to ban it.

ByteDance has fired four employees who obtained personal information from two journalists covering TikTok following an internal investigation, a company spokesman said.

Employees are suspected of trying to use journalists’ account data to find out which sources they communicated with within the company.

The company has previously denied the allegations. TikTok CEO Show Zi Chu said, “This misconduct is not at all in line with what I know to be the principles of our company.”

London-based NGO Privacy International said the problem goes deeper. “The attack on journalists in the interests of corporate interests says something unclear about the nature of the organization,” the spokesman said. I.

“Companies too often, when they get caught, claim that misguided employees are the cause of the problem.” The spokesperson added: “The crux of the problem lies in their business model. We can only hope that this marks the end of an era.

“Companies like ByteDance that collect mountains of data have been labeled as ‘innovative’ for far too long. Bulk data collection is not new, it’s downright dangerous. Huge datasets are ripe for use.”

One of the affected journalists, Emily Baker-White. Forbessaid TikTok “confirmed what it feebly tried to deny in October: that ByteDance has been stalking and harassing me and my colleagues to interfere with our reporting.”

Another journalist attacked was Christina Criddle, a British tech reporter for financial times.

British MPs called for action following the revelations. “Because TikTok uses this place to spy on journalists, they can follow all of us, so we all need protection,” said Geraint Davies of the Labor Party.

Former Conservative leader Ian Duncan Smith said the network was used to “spy on reporters”.

The scandal is likely to spark support for legislation to ban TikTok in the US, introduced by Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who said it could be used as a tool by China’s ruling Communist Party.

“Beijing may… collect sensitive national security information from US government officials and develop profiles of millions of Americans to use for extortion or espionage,” he warned in a recent article for Washington Post.

Corinne Fife, a privacy and cybersecurity specialist at Cornell Institute of Technology in New York, suggests the scandal reflects an industry-wide concern.

“The recent TikTok revelations are worrisome, especially given US concerns about the company’s security, but we have to acknowledge that they fit into a larger picture of data breaches by social media employees,” he says.

“Facebook also has a history of layoffs of employees who used privileged account access to track users of the platform, while Twitter previously found that contractors tracked the location data of celebrities, including Beyoncé.”

“It’s just a fact that the more data these companies collect and the more employees have access to it, the higher the risk of abuse somewhere in the future,” Herr added. Vacation.

“The solution is to implement strong internal controls that restrict access to the data employees can access at any given time, and ideally protect user privacy by reducing the overall amount of data collected. If that fails, we will definitely see more situations like this in the future.”