A former executive at TikTok's parent company ByteDance has claimed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members accessed user data collected by the app to monitor and track Hong Kong activists and protesters in 2018, BBC reported.
The members allegedly used a ''god credential'' at ByteDance to examine the personal data of civil rights activists and protesters in Hong Kong, Mr. Yintao Yu said in the filing lodged this week in a San Francisco court.
Notably, Mr. Yu, a former head of engineering in the US for ByteDance, made these revelations as part of a wrongful dismissal lawsuit. He alleged he was fired in retaliation for his complaints to ByteDance supervisors about illegal conduct at the company.
He said that a special committee in Beijing had a backdoor to firewalls erected by ByteDance to protect user data and used this access to spy on users in Hong Kong.
''Protesters', supporters', and civil rights activists' device identifiers were tracked in addition to their network information, SIM card identifications, and IP addresses,'' Mr. Yu said in the filing.
''This information was used to determine both the users' identity and locations. The TikTok app stores all the users' direct messages, their search histories, the content viewed by the users, and their duration. From the logs, I saw that the Committee accessed the protestors', civil rights activists, and supporters' unique user data, locations, and communications," he added.
He also claimed that the CCP members monitored all data on the platform, including that of users in the US.
''This was a backdoor to any barrier ByteDance had supposedly installed to protect data from the CCP's surveillance. The superuser credential was commonly discussed between employees at various levels of the company, including senior executives,” the filing to the Superior Court of San Francisco read, as per Time.
A ByteDance spokesperson denied the claims, describing them as ''baseless''.
"We plan to vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations in this complaint,'' a ByteDance spokesperson told BBC.
With 150 million users in the US, TikTok has already been under intense scrutiny in Washington due to security concerns, with some lawmakers even proposing a ban on the app.
In India, the app was banned on June 29, 2020, over national security issues. The government move came amid escalating tensions between India and China over the June 15 clash in Ladakh in which 20 Indian soldiers were killed in action.
