Two days before Christmas, TikTok called London-based journalist Cristina Criddle to tell her two of its employees in China, and two in the US, had viewed user data from her personal account without her knowledge or consent.
A BBC report states that Criddle was terrified by what took place.
She said “it was just really chilling and horrible and, personally, quite violating.”
“I was at my family home with my teenage sister, teenage cousins – and they all use TikTok all of the time. They were like, ‘Whoa, should we be worried?'”.
What happened to Cristina – a Financial Times technology correspondent and a friend and former colleague of mine – is what TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, have consistently denied happens at all.
The hack of Ms Criddle’s and another journalist’s phones were blamed on the ‘misconduct of a few individuals’ by Beijing-based parent company ByteDance when the story first emerged in December.
Hackers attempted to compare her IP address – the unique number for every device connected to the internet – with work colleagues suspected of briefing her, in order to prove they had been in proximity to each other.