A former employee from TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance claimed that the Chinese Communist Party has “supreme access” to all the data held by the company. According to CNN, the ex-employee claimed that the data to which the Xi Jinping administration allegedly had access also include the data on the servers in the United States. As per the American news outlet, the former employee made these revelations as the filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the internet giant.
The former employee Yintao “Roger” Yu filed a lawsuit of wrongful termination against Bytedance in a court in San Francisco earlier this month. In the lawsuit, the employee mentioned that he worked with the company from August 2017 to November 2018, CNN reported. The assertions from the employee came at a time when several Western nations including the US are scrutinising the amount of hold the Chinese government has over the social media networking platform TikTok.
In the lawsuit, the employee who was working as the head of engineering for US operations claimed that the Chinese Communist Party had an office in the company. Sometimes the representative working there was known as the “committee”. This committee monitors how ByteDance can advance the core “communist values” on the social media platform. “The Committee maintained supreme access to all the company data, even data stored in the United States,” the complaint obtained by CNN stated.
Company made US data accessible to Chinese Communist Party, claims Yu
In the fresh details of the lawsuit filed on Friday, Yu alleged that the company made the user data accessible to the Chinese Communist Party. The former employee also accused the company of sharing, evaluating and removing content, based on the request of the CCP. However, the Internet technology company has vehemently denied the allegations and made it clear that it will contest the lawsuit. “We plan to vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations in this complaint,” a spokesperson from the company told CNN. “Mr Yu worked for ByteDance Inc. for less than a year and his employment ended in July 2018,” he further added.