A former executive at ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, alleged in a court filing that the Chinese Communist Party had access to Hong Kong protestors’ data, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The allegations involve the CCP using a backdoor channel to view user data, even if it’s stored by an American company. The threat comes admits growing concerns about risks posed by the platform to both individual and national security.
China has access to US data, former Tik Tok executive claims
— Spotlight on China (@spotlightoncn) May 16, 2023
Tik Tok strongly insisted it maintains data security, but a fired executive alleges the contrary.
Yintao Yu 尹涛宇 on May 12 filed a lawsuit against his former employer, Tik Tok’s parent company ByteDance, and alleged… pic.twitter.com/N7p4Nd364R
ByteDance Fired Their Executive After Speaking Out Against the CCP
Yintao “Roger” Yu, who lead ByteDance’s US engineering division from 2017-2018, was fired for criticizing the CCP’s exploitation of user data, monitoring it directly from their headquarters in Beijing by members of the “committee.”
Yu filed a wrongful termination lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court Monday, specifically alleging the CCP cataloged the communication data, IP addresses, and SIM card IDs of Hong Kong protestors in 2018.
The company called Yu’s claim baseless and without merit in the WSJ, noting he waited five years to file post-termination.
Per @georgia_wells: the Chinese Communist Party gained access to Hong Kong TikTok user data.
— Michael Sobolik (@michaelsobolik) June 6, 2023
How? ByteDance reserved a “backdoor channel” for Beijing.
In other words: the CCP leveraged TikTok to surveil Hong Kong democracy activists at a sensitive political moment. pic.twitter.com/KHUeVc9CT8
Yu’s attorney responded by saying his decision to file came after TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before Congress earlier in the year. Chew previously denied to Congress that the CCP influenced the company, let alone was harvesting data.
CCP Maintains an Extensive Network of Control Over The Network
According to the lawsuit, the CCP’s committee had absolute access to any data they wanted to observe; any engineer in the headquarters could also obtain the information at will.
CCP engineers also could use killswitches, which would turn off the app entirely, hindering communication between parties they sought to silence. Yu said the CCP uses the platform purely as a propaganda tool.
When the CCP received criticism regarding the observance network situation in Beijing, party heads simply moved the engineering to Singapore. Yu says this is nothing but a change in geography.
This article appeared in The Political Globe and has been published here with permission.
