Ex-TikTok executive says Chinese government used app to locate, identify Hong Kong protesters
A former executive at 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 data held by the company to identify and locate protesters in Hong Kong.
Yintao Yu, formerly head of engineering for ByteDance in the United States, says those same people had access to U.S. user data, an accusation that the company denies.
Yu, who worked for the company in 2018, made the allegations in a recent filing for a wrongful dismissal case filed in May in the San Francisco Superior Court. In the documents submitted to the court, he said ByteDance had a "superuser credential" — also known as a "god credential" — that enabled a special committee of Chinese Communist Party members stationed at the company to view all data collected by ByteDance, including those of U.S. users.
