HanaBothWays t1_j2xam4p wrote on January 4, 2023 at 4:29 PM

Reply to comment by Craterdome in Why TikTok’s future has never been so cloudy by prehistoric_knight

ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, fired the employees who inappropriately accessed user data including the data of journalists. Seems like those employees were doing on their own in violation of company rules and ByteDance was not okay with it!

Lawmakers’ stated concerns about TikTok are not related to that issue specifically, and are mostly speculation about what the Chinese government might do with that data if they compel ByteDance to hand it over.

Congress also did not need to pass a law banning TikTok from being installed on Federal government devices (AKA Government Furnished Equipment or GFE). The White House or certain offices within Executive Branch agencies can prohibit certain software from being installed on GFE, without a bill being passed. If you know that, you know passing a bill to make that happen is a bunch of jingoistic chest-thumping nonsense.

Craterdome t1_j2xb1yu wrote on January 4, 2023 at 4:32 PM

Hey look they found some scapegoats to fire. Look I don’t trust them and you do, not much more to argue about here.

HanaBothWays t1_j2xcbxv wrote on January 4, 2023 at 4:40 PM

You can be a conspiracy theorist about it or man up and apply the Occam’s Razor principle, maybe.

WeatherMonster t1_j2xhzcf wrote on January 4, 2023 at 5:16 PM

Occam's Razor says China is using Tik Tok to spy on everyone.

[deleted] t1_j2xcpos wrote on January 4, 2023 at 4:43 PM

[deleted]

StrangerThanGene t1_j2xd0da wrote on January 4, 2023 at 4:45 PM

>The internal ByteDance report, as first reported by the New York Times, found that the employees accessed IP addresses and other data of two U.S.-based reporters via their TikTok accounts — one for BuzzFeed News and one at the Financial Times — along with several individuals connected to the reporters.

This should be even more concerning. ByteDance is a company that allows employees user-access to database entries.

This is... wildly unsecure. Screw the employees, how in the hell did they even have access to client IP information? It's literally not something any employee would ever have cause to access. This is why we write functions to handle traffic.

The fact that this happened at all should be setting off every alarm bell and red flag you have about data security.