Either way, in October, we again wrote about another story by Baker-White, now at Forbes, talking about how ByteDance appeared to use TikTok data to try to spy on certain US citizens, though the details were vague. As we said at the time, this seemed like the sort of thing that should spur people to pass a comprehensive federal privacy law, not that that’s happened. Instead, we’ve just been getting more and more performative nonsense focused exclusively on TikTok, rather than on the underlying problem.

Now, Baker-White has the third piece in this trilogy that ties them all together. Apparently one of the US citizens ByteDance was trying to spy on… was Baker-White herself, and it was because of the original Buzzfeed article, as the company sought to track down how the initial info was leaked. It’s quite a story and you should read the whole thing, though here’s just a snippet.