jacobIf the grandkid of Bob Woodward, legendary reporter for the Washington Post, reached out to the millennial next of kin of Deep Throat to secretly rendezvous in an underground garage at 1401 Wilson Boulevard guess who would be the third person in the room? ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.
Now the company that has a pair of ears in the pocket of every kid in America (and Australia) is in the eyes of the FBI and Department of Justice for spying on journalists.
According to a source in position to know, the DOJ Criminal Division, Fraud Section, working alongside the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, has subpoenaed information from ByteDance regarding efforts by its employees to access U.S. journalists’ location information or other private user data using the TikTok app.
Forbes
TikTok spokesperson stated that TikTok collects approximate location information based on users’ IP addresses to “among other things, help show relevant content and ads to users, comply with applicable laws, and detect and prevent fraud and inauthentic behavior.” Furthermore, ByteDance is not the first tech juggernaut to monitor specific U.S. users:
In 2017, the New York Times reported that Uber had identified various local politicians and regulators and served them a separate, misleading version of the Uber app to avoid regulatory penalties. At the time, Uber acknowledged that it had run the program, called “greyball,” but said it was used to deny ride requests to “opponents who collude with officials on secret ‘stings’ meant to entrap drivers,” among other groups. … Both Uber and Facebook also reportedly tracked the location of journalists reporting on their apps. A 2015 investigation by the Electronic Privacy Information Center found that Uber had monitored the location of journalists covering the company.
Forbes
