, citing an email from Andersen, said the spying targeted Emily Baker-White, a former BuzzFeed reporter who’s now with Forbes, and Cristina Criddle of the Financial Times, among others. Though the attempts were unsuccessful, it resulted in at least four members of staff based in both the US and China improperly accessing such data..
“We await a direct response from ByteDance, as this raises fundamental questions about what they are doing with the information they compile from TikTok users,” Lane added. TikTok spokesperson Hilary McQuaide commented on the reporting, saying, “The misconduct of certain individuals, who are no longer employed at ByteDance, was an egregious misuse of their authority to obtain access to user data. This misbehavior is unacceptable, and not in line with our efforts across TikTok to earn the trust of our users.”
While this is not the first instance of a tech company using its resources to spy on journalists – Uber had previously been in hot water after former executivewithout her consent – what distinguishes the ByteDance-TikTok issue is that TikTok told lawmakers in June 2022 that access to certain data of US users would be “limited only to authorized personnel, pursuant to protocols being developed with the US Government.