The story of the British journalist tracked by TikTok

A British journalist has claimed to have been spied on by TikTok, in an attempt by the social network to identify its sources. Cristina Criddle, Financial Times Technology Section, He assured that social network workers would have followed his IP and its location thanks to the account he had made for his cat, named Buffy.

TikTok contacted the journalist, noting that such “espionage” would not correspond to a generalized act by the company, but to “the misconduct of certain individuals” from the Chinese company ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok.

According to what Criddle told the BBC, two days before Christmas he received a call from TikTok, telling him that two employees of the social network in China, and two others in the United States, had seen data from his personal account. without his knowledge or consent. “It was a really scary and horrible situation, and personally, an abuse,” the reporter said.

“I was at my family, with my teenage sister and teenage cousins, all using TikTok all the time. And they said ‘should we be worried?’ Criddle recounted. The journalist had been writing stories on TikTok for some time and communicating with company employees who served as her sources for her writing.

TikTok confirmed that members of one of its departments compared Criddle’s IP address with the IP address of one of its employees, in order to establish and know who would serve as a source for the journalist. In any case, the social network recognized that it was an “abuse of power”, and that the employees who carried out this “espionage” did so without asking permission.

Criddle doesn’t know how long she’s been tracked, or how often: she only knows it was in the summer of 2022. Which wouldn’t be cool if that was the case, but they would also have interfered in my personal life” commented the journalist.

“The really scary thing and the really threatening thing that I was just trying to do my job,” says Criddle, whose TikTok account was on his personal phone, but under the name of his cat, Buffy. Neither his name nor his work was mentioned in his biography, and the account has kept a low profile: around 170 subscribers and 20 videos of her cat in nearly three years of use.

Bytedance said it “deeply regrets” what meant a “significant breach” of its code of conduct, by its workers, and assured it was “committed to ensuring this never happens again.” Never”. Likewise, they stated that North American and Western user data in general is not stored in China, and that staffers who spied on Criddle and other Western journalists over the past year have already been fired.

In March, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before a US congressional committee and was questioned about the incident of spying on journalists. In this regard, he replied: “I don’t think ‘spying’ is the right way to describe what was done.”

In 2022, Criddle had spoken with TikTok staff who were unhappy with the company’s practices. According to the company, espionage was unable to reveal, in any case, the sources that Criddle used for his reports. For now, Criddle is keeping his account open on the network, because he needs it for his job. However, he no longer uses TikTok on his personal phone, but on a more basic phone that he keeps at work.

The journalist points out that what TikTok has done violates the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which states that users must give “active consent” to how their data is used. For this reason, serious penalties and fines could be imposed on a company that violates these regulations.

For now, TikTok is trying to survive in the United States, where many politicians look suspiciously at its Chinese origins and what it does with people’s data. There are already countries that have restricted the use of this social network on public devices. In any case, the social network is still very popular, with more than 3.5 billion downloads worldwide.