Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.
In a bizarre incident, Chinese firm TikTok has been found to have tracked the whereabouts of a British journalist through her cat’s account on the social media app.
Cristina Criddle, a Financial Times technology reporter, was informed by TikTok and its parent company ByteDance that employees in China had viewed her user data without her consent.
Apparently TikTok was trying to establish if anyone at the social media company was secretly meeting with Criddle for her Financial Times articles about it.
However, what makes the situation strange is that Criddle’s TikTok account was in the name of her cat, “Buffy,” as a means of protecting her identity.
The TikTok account in Buffy’s name had 170 followers and 20 videos of the cat that had been viewed a few hundred times. There was nothing identifying Criddle or her work as a journalist.
However, TikTok managed to find Criddle and track her movements anyway.
The disclosure that TikTok tracked the movements and location of a Financial Times reporter comes as a growing number of governments debate banning the social media app.
Concerns are growing that TikTok parent company ByteDance, and, by extension, the Chinese government is using the social media app to steal people’s data and track their location.
In a statement, ByteDance said it “deeply regrets” what was a “significant violation” of its code of conduct in the Criddle case and was “committed to ensuring this never happens again.”
TikTok remains the world’s most popular social media app with more than 3.5 billion accounts worldwide.
