Ex-ByteDance Executive Claims Chinese Communist Party Accessed Tiktok’s Data to Spy on Hong Kong’s Civil Rights Activists

TikTok's parent company was accused of allowing the Chinese Communist Party to access the personal data of civil rights activists and protesters in Hong Kong to identify and track them down. A former executive of ByteDance revealed this.

TikTok Helps Tracking Hong Kong Activists?

ByteDance Ltd. is TikTok's parent company. Its former head of engineering in the United States, Yintao "Roger" Yu, revealed in a court filing that the company helped the Chinese Communist Party to access the data of some Hong Kong activists.

According to Bloomberg, members of the communist party used a "god credential" to examine the obtained personal data from the company. Civil rights activists and protesters in Hong Kong were the main targets of the party to have access to their TikTok data, including their network information, SIM card identifications, and IP addresses, in an effort to locate them.

Yu noted that the data also includes the users' locations and communications on the platform. According to the filing in San Francisco Superior Court, "this was a backdoor to any barrier ByteDance had supposedly installed to protect data from the Chinese Communist Party's surveillance."

Yu revealed that the "god credential" or the party's "superuser credential" was "commonly discussed between employees at various levels of the company, including senior executives." Aside from this, the lawsuit added that the communist party also worked with ByteDance to promote its propaganda.

Yu noted that the company demoted content that expressed support for the protests in Hong Kong, also known as the "Umbrella Revolution," but promoted content that expressed criticisms of the demonstrations.

Former ByteDance Executive

All of these allegations are part of a lawsuit filed in May by Yu. According to Forbes, Yu served as the head of engineering for ByteDance's California office from August 2017 to November 2018.

He reportedly filed the lawsuit against his former company as part of a wrongful termination. Yu claimed that he was fired in retaliation for his complaints to ByteDance supervisors about illegal conduct at the firm.

Response of Tiktok

In response to these allegations, Wall Street Journal reported that TikTok released a statement and said: "We vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations in this complaint."

A spokeswoman for ByteDance noted that Yu only worked on an app called Flipagram, which was already discontinued years ago for business reasons. She added that Yu's actions are only intended to garner media attention as he has never raised these allegations in the five years his working in the company.

Yu's lawyer, Charles Jung, argued that his client decided to come forward now due to the alleged deceptive testimony of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at a congressional hearing last March. By revealing this story, Jung noted that Yu is placing himself at risk, but his client still prefers telling the truth "to bring social change."