In a recent court filing in the United States, former ByteDance executive Yintao Yu has accused TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, of permitting Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members to access the data of Hong Kong civil rights activists and protesters.
According to the report, Yu alleges that individuals who uploaded content related to protests were identified and monitored, and that CCP members had the ability to access data from TikTok users in the United States as well.
However, a spokesperson for ByteDance has dismissed these claims as unfounded.
In the lawsuit filed at San Francisco Superior Court, Yu claimed that members of a CCP committee had access to a “superuser” credential referred to as the “god user,” which granted them access to all the data collected by ByteDance.
He further asserted that these committee members were not employees of ByteDance but were physically present at the company’s offices in Beijing.
Yu contended that this information was well-known among senior executives during his tenure as the head of engineering for ByteDance in the United States from August 2017 onwards.
The court filing also alleged that in 2018, the CCP committee members utilized their “god credential” to “identify and locate the Hong Kong...
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