"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".

I'd just like to point out that an IP address can only tell you what city a user is in. Plus geodata for residential IPs is often inaccurate as it usually shows the city of your ISPs POP that your internet line is uplinked to, which can sometimes be several cities away (or even in a different state if you live on a state border).

Still shitty what TikTok is doing, just wanted to point out that the article title is misleading, probably to get a bigger "OMG" response. You can't get someone's physical address or GPS coordinates from their public IP, that's just not how the internet works.