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cemyl95 t1_j1cdphp wrote

"comparing public IP for a bytedance employee with a journalist's IP" and "spying on a user's physical location using their IP" are not the same. And unless they're connected to someone's home network, it doesn't actually tell them where they were physically located, as the title implies, rather just that they were (maybe) in the same building as a bytedance employee. Even that's hit or miss though because multiple distinct locations could be sharing the same public IP.

As an example: journalist and employee stay at two different locations of the same hotel chain. Depending on how the chain's network is configured, they could both be uplinked to the chain's local data center and have the same public IP, even though they're at different locations.

The point I'm trying to make here is, when you're dealing with enterprise networking, you can't just say "same IP = same location".

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Sp3llbind3r t1_j1cw2se wrote

It‘s like it was with trump.

It‘s not less of a crime just because he is to stupid to do it properly.

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neuronexmachina t1_j1d7w1y wrote

I assume the goal was to narrow down the list of potential leakers, which IP addresses would be useful for. Regarding your hotel chain example, they could just perform a reverse lookup to see it's an IP belonging to a hotel chain, and weight the information accordingly along with other information they have about their employees.

Also, the article doesn't mention this, but checking the Google Play Store and Apple App Store entries for TikTok, it looks like location data is part of what the app has access to.

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tommyk1210 t1_j1h12zo wrote

It might narrow it down sure, but a public IP could belong to dozens of hotels in the same chain (if they share a central network)

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