Taipei, Taiwan – China’s Communist Party (CCP) can access user data collected by TikTok owner ByteDance through a “god credential” that it used to monitor and track Hong Kong activists and protesters in 2018, a former ByteDance executive has claimed in a lawsuit.
In a court filing, Yintao “Roger” Yu, a former head of engineering at ByteDance in the United States, 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.
