Former ByteDance executive says Chinese Communist Party tracked Hong Kong protesters via data

HONG KONG: A former executive at ByteDance, the Chinese company which 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 US, says those same people had access to US 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 US users.

The credential acted as a “backdoor to any barrier ByteDance had supposedly installed to protect data from the CCP’s surveillance”, the filing says.

Hong Kong in recent years has come under more far-reaching control by Beijing following mass protests in 2014 and 2019.

Yu said he saw the god credential being used to keep tabs on Hong Kong protesters and civil rights activists by monitoring their locations and devices, their network information, SIM card identifications, IP addresses and communications.

ByteDance said in a statement that Yu’s accusations were “baseless”.

“It’s curious that Mr Yu has never raised these allegations in the five years since his employment for Flipagram was terminated in July 2018,” the company said, referring to an app that ByteDance later shut down for business reasons. “His actions are clearly intended to garner media attention.

“We plan to vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations in this complaint,” ByteDance said.