Among other things, the United States is banning the use of a video application that is considered a security risk for federal employees.
Among other things, the US administration has been concerned about the way the TikTok application collects information about its users. PDO
The video application TikTok has already raised concerns among information security experts. The application has been reported to collect data, among other things, through its built-in browser. Now the service has admitted that it used the data to find out the location of some suppliers, he says Financial Times.
ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, admitted according to the Financial Times that user data was analyzed as part of the company’s internal investigation. The company said it had investigated data leaks, and based on the location data collected by the application, it was possible to find out whether the company’s employees had been in contact with suppliers. However, the Financial Times reported that the leaker of the internal information was not found.
The spying targeted at least three journalists who had been investigating TikTok’s operations and other users who had connections to those journalists.
Forbes revealed information about TikTok’s monitoring activities back in October. At the time, the company said it was not possible to spy on users located in the United States in the way Forbes claimed. It was later revealed that the data had been spied on in just this way.
Employees dismissed
of The Guardian according to information, after the spying was revealed, ByteDance has fired the person responsible for internal investigations, whose predecessor in turn fired. In addition, all four employees who handled the suppliers’ data have been dismissed.
In an internal email leaked to the public, the CEO of ByteDance Rubo Liang said he was very disappointed with the situation.
– The public’s trust, which we have built with great effort, is being undermined by the misconduct of a few individuals, Liang wrote to his employees.
Worry in the air in the US
According to the Financial Times, the US Congress will vote this week on a law that would ban federal employees from using the TikTok app on their work phones and devices. The Senate, i.e. the upper house of the Congress, has already approved the law, next the lower house of the Senate must approve it.
Some US states, such as Maryland, Texas, and Iowa, have also planned to ban their employees from using TikTok.