TikTok admits to tracking USA journalists' data

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/22/tech/tiktok-bytedance-journalist-data/index.html

But they say the employees acted without authorization...

And I don't know who would be stupid enough to believe them...

This is fine. Let's encourage our kids to get on more Chinese owned platforms.

It's a platform for degenerates. I'm sad to see my sisters kids obsessed with it. They are so socially inept it's amazing how it just seems to zombify people.

I don't care about tracking data. Everyone does. I care that this horrid application is infecting people, turning them into mindless drones who stare at their phones constantly. It's almost as dangerous as this MAGA idiocy.

@girlusocrazy: and who represents tiktok if not byte dance employees working on behalf of the company only to be thrown under the bus when discovered?

@nirgal: The discovery was made by a global internal compliance investigation led by an external law firm.

CNN didn’t bother to report that part of the story and this changes how readers perceive the story.

If anything, it shows that TikTok is open and transparent and willing to make public its internal non-compliance issues.

all of these social media platforms are tracking very very deep and barely skirt by on privacy laws. Its not even a secret. You will be shocked to hear how much platforms like facebook, instagram etc knows about you, and they sell out your data to advertisers on the daily basis. This is very well known, open knowledge.

Is that so? Perhaps you prefer Forbes?

“It is standard practice for companies to have an internal audit group authorized to investigate code of conduct violations,” TikTok General Counsel Erich Andersen wrote in a second internal email shared with Forbes. “However, in this case individuals misused their authority to obtain access to TikTok user data.”

Forbesfirst reported the surveillance tactics, which were overseen by a China-based team at ByteDance, in October. Asked for comment on that story, ByteDance and TikTok did not deny the surveillance, but took to Twitter after the story was published to say that “TikTok has never been used to ‘target’ any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists,” and that “TikTok could not monitor U.S. users in the way the article suggested.” In the internal email, Liang acknowledged that TikTok had been used in exactly this way, as Forbes had reported.

The investigation, internally known as Project Raven, began this summer after BuzzFeed News published a story revealing that China-based ByteDance employees had repeatedly accessed U.S. user data, based on more than 80 hours of audio recordings of internal TikTok meetings. According to internal ByteDance documents reviewed byForbes, Project Raven involved the company’s Chief Security and Privacy Office, was known to TikTok’s Head of Global Legal Compliance, and was approved by ByteDance employees in China. It tracked Emily Baker-White, Katharine Schwab and Richard Nieva, three Forbes journalists that formerly worked at BuzzFeed News.

We see this type of stuff all the time. Facebook and Uber previously got caught tracking journalists and politicians. McKinsey got caught proposing programs to intentionally addict and kill people with opioids. They always feign shock that such actions occurred and claim that it was the result of rogue 'individuals', totally unknown to executives.

Like Joe Schmoe who's working 40 hour weeks as a system administrator is going to track journalists on his own without direction, LOL. What is he even going to do with the information?

Come on, man,

It's even a century-old movie trope.

@blaznwiipspman1: but do those companies work directly for an authoritarian hostile government likely to start a war soon in east Asia?

The same government that prevents free speech in all social media in their own country as well as competition from foreign platforms...

@kadin_kai: are we supposed to believe that a couple of non influencial employees started investigating journalist without any directions from management...

https://www.engadget.com/us-house-of-representatives-bans-tik-tok-070722060.html

TikTok is now banned on any device owned and managed by the US House of Representatives, according toReuters. The House's Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) reportedly told all lawmakers and their staff in an email that they must delete the app from their devices, because it's considered "high risk due to a number of security issues." Everyone detected to have the social networking application on their phones would be contacted to make sure it's deleted, and any future downloads are prohibited.

We could at least make it slightly difficult for people to steal our info but its too late literally everyone under the age of 25 has tiktok on their phone.

@nirgal: I'm not a fan of China, but banning their companies is a slippery slope to more communism than we already have. As if patents, trademarks and IP weren't commie enough, now youre banning companies because you cant compete. Banning huawei was a disgrace, and now theyre talking about banning tiktok. Its just nonsense. I don't use tiktok though, it's useless and highly addictive. It's a waste of time.

Also, I'm not really interested in Taiwan or china's obsession with them. Actually I'm against Taiwan. The tsmc is a giant scam and has very little competition world wide. They're the reason for our very expensive Chips recently and personally I'm glad we're building manufacturing plants stateside instead.

@blaznwiipspman1: it's a situation which no social media has access to their market but they have access to all other markets.

If you want to protect free speech they can simply be demonetized, but you cant allow this degree of market unbalance.

And the reason you don't care about the Chinese system expanding is because you haven't lived under it .

And I don't see why you would be against Taiwan simply because of tsmc they are simply one company, not the entire country.

people dont like facts anymore....

@nirgal: Have you got any evidence to prove otherwise or is it your personal bias?

Moreover, Bytedance was not required to disclose anything.

The fact that they hired an external law firm to work with an internal compliance team to investigate shows transparency.

Or are you also claiming the law firm is also lying to the world?

@kadin_kai: it's simply logic ，researching the journalist was to protect byte dance interests, not to benefit the employees personally.

Hiring the external compliance team looks like a pr stunt that backfired frankly.

I don't even know how or why TikTok took off with kids when there was already YouTube.

@nirgal: So show me the evidence that the employees was doing something to protect Bytedance?

Why would it be a PR stunt when the investigation was internal? They could have covered it up and said nothing!

Your logic is illogical.

Also get your facts straight! The global compliance team is a part of Bytedance. Every major company has an internal compliance and internal audit department. They were not hired.

Obviously you’ve never worked at a large company!

Bytedance employed an external law firm!

Get your facts straight!

@kadin_kai: the employees were trying to track the location of journalists related to company leaks using their IPs.

The news was broken by Forbes and buzzfeed and (originally) denied by bytedance.

The CNN reports claims the investigation was done by an external law firm.

And btw, not only have i worked for large companies, i worked for large companies within mainland china. The corruption, bribery and internal power struggles were extremely common. If it would not compromise me, i would tell you with details about how they would take money abroad to bribe latin American officials to have projects approved.

In fact, i suspect you are the one that hasn't worked in mainland and doesn't speak Mandarin.

Otherwise you would not find any of this strange, you would have simply assumed it happened before you even heard about it.ñ, because everyone know corruption is common and everyone knows large companies must act as arms of the communist party abroad. It's their patriotic duty to do so.

@nirgal: And it was an internal investigation, which did not need any disclosure.

Hence it shows transparency.

Yes you worked in a very large firm without an internal audit team? Must be huge! LOL!

An internal investigation that cleared itself?

Shocking

@InEMplease: An internal investigation led by an external law firm. After all Bytedance didn’t need to do anything.

Who hired the law firm?

@kadin_kai: the moment that info is held by an external firm, it's the moment that info is liable to be leaked.

They didn't have a choice. I would have comed up and they would have looked worse for refusing (again) to admit it .

wait, how is TSMC a scam exactly??

@comp_atkins: Blazn speaks in hyperbole regularly. I think he means, "monopoly."

Just like banning TikTok isn't socialist. I think he means Protectionist.

it's an ingeniously designed app tbf. digital opium

yes, they are a monopoly. They are the apple of the chip manufacturing industry, and they are a disgraceful existance. The lack of competition is hurting both consoles and PC gamers. We need far more manufacturing plants to compete with TSMC and they need to be built in the US first, then north america, and EU. No where near china.

Banning tiktok isn't just protectionist, it goes beyond that and into communist territory. I didn't like it when Trump banned huawei either, its a disgraceful admission that our own companies tech couldn't compete with the chinese.

@blaznwiipspman1: That has literally nothing to do with Socialism. I can't really blame you, the GOP has trained everyone to think everything that isn't their preferred policy choice is Socialist.

they have roughly 55% of foundry market share, so yes large, but not monopolistic. are there anti-competitive activities they practice?

intel has goals of supplanting samsung as the #2 foundary this decade. so we'll see how that goes. speaking of intel, what about their near 100% monopoly on CPU revenue?

@comp_atkins: tsmc are scum, this is a fact and they are a monopoly. Maybe not as bad as Apple, but close.

Intel is nowhere near as bad. They are an amazing company BTW, and they face stiff competition from AMD, apple and even the mobile market. This isn't the 90s my friend, welcome to 2023.

again, why is TSMC scum? what exactly are they doing to make them scum in your opinion?

intel has a 75% share of laptop x86 market and like 85% of worldwide server cpu market.

amd is making inroads in desktop / gaming but that's a small slice of the total cpu market.

the hyperscalers are starting to roll their own ( e.g. aws gravitron ) now so that'll be at the expense of both amd/intel but moreso intel on the server side.

it'll also be interesting to see where arm ( e.g. M1) and/or risc-v end up in the mix.

Intel drove AMD almost out of the CPU market with shady practices, didn't they?

@horgen: @comp_atkins: all monopoly are scumbags, this is a fact. Apple is a pos scum of a company. They keep hiding behind the 15% marketshare BS, but the fact they take over 75% of all mobile profit is disgraceful and its all because of the sheep out there. Sheep always get fleeced. Same with scumbags Nvidia and their 90% market share and profit. Bunch of pieces of shit always getting supported by the sheep. TSMC is on that list. They sell over rated and over priced junk.

Intel and MS aren't bad, they have strong competition. You say Intel is a monopoly but the overall pc market has declined big time and mobile has taken a big chunk of that. As for MS, they are always fighting it out against linux, against chrome, Android, macos, ios. MS doesn't even charge much for their OS anymore and now entered the cloud.

Anyone who supports monopoly should be ashamed of themselves. They are the problem with this world.

@blaznwiipspman1:

TSMC's customer base is absolutely enormous. what metrics are you using to judge their products as overpriced junk? how are they overrated? which products specifically? is it a specific process node which is junk? just the new stuff? how so?

it's nearly fucking impossible to actually build working chips at the highest-end process nodes at this point. the investment in equipment and engineering talent required is monstrous. as such there are very few entities wealthy enough to even attempt it. when the pool is small, of course you're going to get companies with large market shares.

i'm sorry, i'm trying to have a legitimate conversation but you're coming off like an angry 14 year-old ranting about the sheep when you fancy yourself a "free thinker"

@comp_atkins: meh I don't know much about the complexities of chip manufacturing. We have lots of advanced tech here ourselves though, stuff that rivals the best of tsmc. But bottom line, check tsmc revenue and profit numbers, it's obvious they are scamming hard.

You don't know much about the complexities of manufacturing yet you're willing to write off a major component because of preconceived notions.

@blaznwiipspman1:

it is really fascinating if you're into bonkers engineering.

asml's new euv machine that all the heavy hitters rely on in just a small piece of things but it's nuts.

@nirgal: Not sure what you mean by, “comed up,” but I guess in your view you think this was a top down operation, that Bytedance ordered the workers to do this.

Obviously you have zero evidence of this and you’ve never been in a position to make decisions and just follow orders.

I guess, you also think K&L Gates, the law firm that handles much of TikTok’s activities are also in cahoots.

Damn. You could be a universal translator on the USS Enterprise.

There's no way to be sure exactly. However, one doesn't commonly take chances and undertake these types of activities in authoritarian China without their superiors knowing/approving. This reflects both the authoritarian and saving face aspects of Chinese culture.

As far as K&L Gates, again it can cut both ways. They are well respected in this area. They are also US based and very connected politically, so as Nirgal was stating it can be perceived as a whitewashing PR measure. A top Swiss firm might have been a better choice.

In short, any Chinese company is automatically going to be suspected in these situations. It goes with the territory when you are run by an authoritarian regime, when companies cannot be assumed to be free from their regime's direction, and when there are countless examples of the regime spying on people both domestically and abroad.

On a related note, I think the sooner the rest of the world starts engaging in economic warfare against authoritarian regimes the better off we will all be in the long run.

@SUD123456: Lol. If only people took the time to learn what the words they use mean.