Yintao Yu, formerly head of engineering for ByteDance in the U.S., 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 Chinese Communist Party members stationed at the company to view all data collected by ByteDance including those of U.S. users.
The credential acted as a "backdoor to any barrier ByteDance had supposedly installed to protect data from the C.C.P's surveillance, the filing says.
Hong Kong is a semi-autonomous region in China with its own government. In recent years, following mass protests in 2014 and 2019, the former British colony has come under more far-reaching control by Beijing.
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."
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