HONG KONG—A former executive at ByteDance, the Chinese company which owns the short-video app TikTok, says in a legal filing that some members of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used data held by the company to identify and locate protesters in Hong Kong.
Yintao Yu, formerly head of engineering for ByteDance in the United States, says those same people had access to U.S. 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 CCP members stationed at the company to view all data collected by ByteDance including those of U.S. users….