In a latest lawsuit, a former ByteDance government has alleged that China’s Communist Party (CCP) can entry person data collected by TikTok by way of a “god credential” that was used to monitor and observe Hong Kong activists and protesters in 2018. Yintao “Roger” Yu, the former head of engineering at ByteDance in the United States, claimed that a particular committee in Beijing had a backdoor to firewalls set up by ByteDance to protect user information and used this access to spy on customers in Hong Kong.
Yu stated within the court docket submitting, “Protesters’, supporters’, and civil rights activists’ device identifiers were tracked in addition to their network information, SIM card identifications, and IP addresses.” He added, “This data was used to find out both the users’ identification and locations. The TikTok app stores all of the users’ direct messages, their search histories, the content material viewed by the customers, and period. From the logs, I saw that the Committee accessed the protestors’, civil rights activists’, and supporters’ distinctive user knowledge, places, and communications.”
The existence of the “god credential” is alleged to be well known amongst ByteDance executives and instantly contradicts promises they’ve made to legislators within the US and other international locations who are debating whether to ban TikTok over national security issues. Cover-up are part of a wrongful dismissal go properly with towards ByteDance, following a court filing in May the place he alleged that the backdoor “allows sure high-level individuals to entry consumer data, regardless of the place the data is situated, even when hosted by a US firm with servers located within the US.”
Furthermore, Yu claimed he witnessed ByteDance using TikTok to additional the CCP’s political agenda, including promoting content material “that expressed hatred for Japan” and demoting content that expressed support for Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement democracy protests. ByteDance can be alleged to have scraped knowledge on its web site and those of opponents like Instagram and Snapchat with out permission..