Platform employees hacked journalist’s personal data to investigate leaks between staff and press LONDON: TikTok has been accused of spying on a British journalist through a social media account named after her cat. The BBC reported on Friday that London-based journalist Cristina Criddle received a call from TikTok two days before Christmas to alert her of the hacking. The Chinese video-sharing platform told her that two of its employees in China and two in the US had viewed user data from her personal account without her knowledge or consent. “It was just really chilling and horrible and, personally, quite violating,” she said. “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?’” TikTok admitted that some of its employees had “misused their authority” to access Criddle’s private information in an attempt to establish a link between the company’s staff and the press following a series of leaks. The company explained that members of its audit department looked at the location of Cristina’s IP address, a unique identifier for a device, and compared it to the IP data of an unknown number of its own employees. The Financial Times technology correspondent said in the interview that she does not know when or for how long she was tracked, but confirmed that last summer she had been talking to TikTok staff about the company practices. Criddle claimed the TikTok account was on her personal phone, but the profile was in the name of her cat, Buffy, and her name and occupation were not listed in the bio. TikTok is no stranger to these types of incidents, which have severely damaged the video-sharing app’s reputation in the eyes of Western officials who are considering a ban on the app in their countries. In December, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance came under fire after announcing that it had fired four employees who improperly accessed the personal data of two journalists on the platform. In a congressional hearing in the US last March, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew denied the company was spying on its users, saying: “I don’t think that spying is the right way to describe it.” In recent months, lawmakers in the US, UK and Europe have escalated efforts to restrict access to TikTok, citing security threats, and many governments have moved to ban the app from government devices.