ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of popular video app TikTok, said Thursday that some employees improperly accessed the TikTok user data of two journalists and were no longer employed by the company, an email seen by Reuters shows.
ByteDance employees accessed the data as part of an unsuccessful effort to investigate leaks of company information earlier this year, and were aiming to identify potential connections between two journalists, a former BuzzFeed reporter and a Financial Times reporter, and company employees, the email from ByteDance general counsel Erich Andersen said.
The employees looked at IP addresses of journalists attempting to learn if they were in the same location as employees suspected of leaking confidential information.