Curated By: Shankhyaneel Sarkar
Last Updated: June 06, 2023, 09:15 IST
San Francisco, California, US
A police officer searches a pro-democracy protester’s purse during a protest against the election of Hong Kong’s next Chief Executive, in Hong Kong, China. (Image: Reuters)
The Communist Party of China set up a committee to snoop on Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters.
A former executive at ByteDance, the parent company of video-sharing app TikTok, said in a legal filing that the Communist Party of China (CPC) accessed the data of TikTok users in Hong Kong in 2018, the Wall Street Journal said in a report. TikTok and ByteDance have denied the allegations.
The former executive, Yintao Yu, made the revelations in a wrongful-dismissal lawsuit filed in early May in San Francisco Superior Court.
Yu said the committee members focused on civil rights activists and protesters in Hong Kong and accessed TikTok data which contained their network information, SIM card identifications and IP addresses, in order to identify and locate those users, the Wall Street Journal said.
The former executive also alleged that TikTok stored all users’ direct messages, search histories and content viewed. He also alleged that ByteDance maintains a “backdoor channel” for the CPC to access American user data.
Yu said the CPC committee accessed user data of protesters, civil rights activists and their supporters and also of users who were identified from previous protests that they may have attended. People who uploaded protest-related material were also surveilled.
The Wall Street Journal highlighted that TikTok-parent ByteDance has a room in one of its Beijing offices where “a Chinese police cybersecurity team is stationed”, highlighting it is common practice at Chinese tech companies.
Yu’s lawsuit and a separate report by the New York Times claims ByteDance scrapes content from competitor social-media platforms and posts it on TikTok to make the app more popular while also engaging in fabricating users and exaggerating key engagement metrics.
He served as the head of engineering for ByteDance’s US offices from 2017 to 2018 and is a California resident. He also spent time in ByteDance’s offices in Los Angeles and Beijing.
A spokesperson for ByteDance said Yu is making these allegations to garner media attention and highlighted he did not make these allegations in the last five years after his dismissal.
Charles Jung, Yu’s lawyer, told the Wall Street Journal that his client came forward because he viewed TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew’s testimony at the congressional hearing in March as a misdirection. He said that his client is placing himself “at risk”. “My client is placing himself at risk by telling his story in court. But the truth is powerful, and telling the truth is what’s needed to bring social change,” Jung was quoted as saying by the Wall Street Journal.
“I have seen no evidence that the Chinese government has access to that data. They have never asked us. We have not provided,” Chew told during the hearing in March.
ByteDance has tried to reassure the US government on several occasions that TikTok is safe for American users. Several US states and the Biden administration have imposed bans on installing and using TikTok on government devices fearing that the data of American users is not in safe hands and amid fears that the Chinese government may use TikTok to promote certain content.
India banned TikTok in June 2020 over privacy concerns and concerns about how China harvests data of Indian users.
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