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Members of the Chinese Communist Party used “god credentials” at TikTok parent ByteDance to check the personal data of civil rights activists and protesters in Hong Kong, and identify and track them, a former executive said. company in a court filing.
Yintao “Roger” Yu, former head of US engineering for ByteDance, described a special Chinese government committee stationed at the company’s offices in Beijing that he said monitored all of the platform’s data, including US users, according to the filing.
“This is a backdoor to any barrier that ByteDance supposedly installed to protect data from surveillance by the Chinese Communist Party,” according to the San Francisco state court filing. The party’s “superuser credentials,” also known as “god credentials,” “are often discussed between employees at different levels of the company, including senior executives,” Yu said.
The company also works with the CCP to promote propaganda, Yu said.
“Yu observed that ByteDance demoted content expressing support for the Hong Kong protests (“Umbrella Revolution”), while it promoted content expressing criticism of the Hong Kong protests,” Yu said. .
Representatives of ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company previously called Yu’s allegations “baseless,” and said it would vigorously fight the lawsuit.
Yu added surveillance claims this week to his May lawsuit saying he was fired in retaliation for his complaints to ByteDance supervisors about the company’s illegal practices. Yu says he saw the “god credential” being used in 2018, the same year he was terminated, to monitor Hong Kong activists identified in previous protests. The filing was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
TikTok is facing increasing pressure, and potential bans, from US state and federal officials following reports that the company stored personal financial information of American users on servers in China. accessible to employees there.
Yu said in his filing that the TikTok app stores users’ direct messages, search histories, what they watched and for how long.
In a signed declaration of his latest filing, Yu said he expected his lawsuit to attract the attention of US and state lawmakers, which would require “a certain level of coordination” among legal professionals. that action. The filings do not explain what such coordination means in any detail.
ByteDance users who uploaded content on the Hong Kong protests were also monitored by Chinese officials and “external investigators,” according to the filing. Activists’ device identifiers were tracked, as well as their network information, SIM card identifications, and IP addresses, Yu said, adding that he saw from the ByteDance logs that committee members were examining unique data. of users, locations, and communications.
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