Global Courant
A former executive of ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the popular short video app TikTok, says in a legal filing that some members of the ruling Communist Party used company data to identify and locate protesters in Hong Kong .
Yintao Yu, former head of engineering for ByteDance in the United States, says those same people had access to US user data, an allegation the company denies.
Yu, who worked for the company in 2018, made the allegations in a recent wrongful dismissal suit filed in San Francisco Superior Court in May. In the documents submitted to the court, he said that ByteDance had a “superuser credential” — also known as a “god credential” — which led a special committee of Chinese Communist Party members stationed at the company, could view all data collected by ByteDance, including that of US users.
The credential acted as a “backdoor to any barrier ByteDance supposedly installed to protect data from the CCP’s scrutiny,” the filing said.
Hong Kong is a semi-autonomous region in China with its own government. In recent years, after massive protests in 2014 and 2019, the former British colony has come under increasing control from Beijing.
Yu said he saw the proof of god being used to monitor protesters and civil rights activists in Hong Kong by monitoring their locations and devices, their network information, SIM card identifiers, IP addresses and communications.
ByteDance said in a statement that Yu’s allegations were “baseless.”
“It is curious that Mr. Yu has never made these allegations in the five years since his employment with Flipagram was terminated in July 2018,” the company said, referring to an app that ByteDance later shut down for business reasons. “His actions are clearly intended to gain media attention.
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“We intend to vigorously oppose what we believe to be baseless claims and allegations in this complaint,” ByteDance said.
Charles Jung, Yu’s lawyer and a partner at the law firm Nassiri & Jung LLP, said Yu chose to advance the allegations because he was “disturbed by the recent testimony of TikTok’s CEO” when Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean vehemently denied Chinese authorities had access to user data.
“Telling the truth openly in court is risky, but social change requires the courage to tell the truth,” Jung said. “It is important to him that government policy is based on accurate information, so he is determined to tell his story.”
Intense control
TikTok is under close scrutiny in the US and globally over how it handles data and whether it poses a national security risk. Some US lawmakers have expressed concern that TikTok’s ties to ByteDance mean that the data it holds is subject to Chinese law.
They also claim that the app, which has more than 150 million monthly active users in the US and more than a billion users worldwide, can be used to expand China’s influence.
At the combative March House hearing, lawmakers from both sides questioned Chew about his company’s alleged ties to Beijing, data security and malicious content on the app. Chew has repeatedly denied that TikTok shares user data or has ties to Chinese authorities.
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To address such concerns, TikTok has said it would work with Oracle to store all US data in the country.
In a previous lawsuit, Yu accused ByteDance of serving as a “propaganda tool” for the Chinese Communist Party by promoting nationalistic content and downgrading content that does not serve the party’s objectives. He also said that ByteDance was responding to the Communist Party’s requests for information to be shared.
Yu also accused ByteDance of scraping content from competitors and users to repost on its sites to exaggerate key engagement metrics. He says he was fired because he shared concerns about “unlawful conduct” he had seen with others at the company.
In mainland China, ByteDance operates Douyin, which targets the domestic market. TikTok is the global app available in most other countries. It was also available in Hong Kong until TikTok pulled out of the market in 2020 after the imposition of a sweeping national security law.
Anyone who tries to access TikTok from Hong Kong will see a message that says, “We are sorry to inform you that we have stopped operating TikTok in Hong Kong.”
