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A former ByteDance executive is alleging in a California court filing that a “backdoor channel” in TikTok’s code allows the Chinese Community Party (CCP) access to user data, even if stored by a U.S. company.
In a May filing in San Francisco Superior Court, Yintao “Roger” Yu, who was the head of engineering of the U.S. offices of ByteDance, Inc. from August 2017 until he was fired in November 2018, said he was astounded by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s “misdirection” while testifying before Congress in March.
“The location of the servers doesn’t protect U.S. data: what matters is whether the backdoor has been closed,” Yu’s attorney wrote on his behalf. “The company was aware that if the Chinese government’s backdoor was removed from the international/U.S. version of the app, the Chinese government would, it feared, ban the company’s valuable Chinese-version apps.”
According to the lawsuit, it was known within ByteDance that the CCP has a special office or unit known as the “committee” to advance core communist values. The committee, Yu alleges, possesses a “death switch” that could turn off all the company’s Chinese apps entirely, including the version of TikTok available in mainland China known as “Douyin.”
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TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 23, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images / Getty Images)
“The Committee maintained supreme access to all the company data, even data stored in the United States. Any engineer in Beijing could access U.S. user data located in the U.S. After receiving criticism about access from abroad, individual engineers in China were restricted from accessing U.S. user data, but the Committee continued to have access,” the lawsuit says.
To address criticisms about CCP control, Yu said he observed the company move its engineers from Beijing outside the country, such as Singapore. However, “there was no substantive change,” and the same people performed engineering duties “simply from outside of the geographic bounds of China.”
Yu also said he “observed a culture of lawlessness within the company,” arguing in the filing that the “attitude was to violate the law first, continue to grow, and pay fines later.”
In March, Chew was grilled by members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on TikTok’s plan dubbed “Project Texas” to have all U.S. data routed to the U.S.-company Oracle. The TikTok CEO claimed the U.S. user data would be managed by U.S. employees through a separate entity called TikTok U.S. Data Security, to be operated independently of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.
The proposal drew heavy skepticism from lawmakers, many of whom argued that only banning the video sharing app could adequately severe the CCP’s tentacles.
A former ByetDance executive alleges that the Chinese Communist Party has access to the company’s app user data through a “backdoor” in the code. (Emmanuel Wong/Getty Images / Getty Images)
The amended complaint, obtained by Fox News Digital, says ByteDance has “served as a useful propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party.”
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Yu said he observed that ByteDance promoted content that expressed hatred for Japan and demoted content that expressed support for the protests in Hong Kong known as the “Umbrella Revolution,” while it promoted content that expressed criticisms of the same pro-democracy demonstrations.
“ByteDance is similarly positioned to exploit nationalistic sentiments in other countries like the United States as well, since it collects data from its users in those countries – data which Mr. Yu observed it makes accessible to the CCP via a backdoor channel,” the complaint says.
A former ByteDance executive is calling out TikTok CEO for “misdirection” during his March testimony before Congress. (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images / Getty Images)
The lawsuit says Yu, who once held an executive level with less than 20 employees of ByteDance’s more than 100,000-person workforce with a higher designation, observed “one senior executive bristle at the critique that TikTok’s algorithm is like ‘digital cocaine,’ while acknowledging that time spent on the platform is the ultimate goal, and in fact the only thing the company cares about.”
Yu said he alerted Wenjia Zhu, formerly senior vice president of engineering and current Global TikTok R&D Chief at ByteDance, numerous times, as early as October 2017 and again in February and March 2018 about the company’s “illegal scraping program.” The lawsuit describes it as a “worldwide scheme” which involves using software purposely unleashed to systematically strip user content from competitor’s websites — chiefly, Instagram and Snapchat — without the users’ permission and populate its own video services with these videos in an effort to make its own services appear more popular to end users.
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Zhu, who is and was in charge of the TikTok algorithm and reported directly to ByteDance’s CEO Yiming Zhang, allegedly was “dismissive” of Yu’s concerns. The program was later modified but continued to scrape content from U.S-based users when they are abroad. The lawsuit claims Yu was eventually fired while on medical leave as retaliation for sounding the alarm to his U.S. employees and is now seeking damages.
