Former ByteDance executive admits the Chinese Communist Party has access to U.S. user data
Former ByteDance executive says the Chinese Communist Party have a back door inside the company
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ByteDance said that it will vigorously fight the lawsuit while calling it “baseless.” The company also pointed out that Yu worked at the company for less than one year. A spokesman for the Chinese tech firm also said, “ByteDance is committed to respecting the intellectual property of other companies, and we acquire data in accordance with industry practices and our global policy.
Yu’s claims contradict ByteDance’s recent letter to Congress
This contradicts correspondence written to Congress this month by ByteDance which claimed that not only hasn’t it ever shared U.S. user data with the Chinese government, it wouldn’t do it even if the CCP demanded Byte Dance to do so. In China, the government is allowed to demand that Chinese tech firms spy on its behalf. TikTok claims that it is walling off U.S. user data along with its U.S. operations with important U.S. user data protected on Oracle servers located in the states.
The complaint also goes into detail about how TikTok used software to strip videos from competitor’s platforms. “These actions were taken without the permission of the content creators and represented an unlawful effort to gain an edge against entrenched online video hosting websites,” said the filing. Yu is asking a San Francisco Superior Court judge to order TikTok to stop lifting content from other social media sites without the permission of content creators.
A resident of California, Yu was hired by ByteDance, awarded stock options, and guaranteed a payment of $600,000 in exchange for the intellectual property of his own company, Tank Exchange. But the contract required him to work for ByteDance for at least two years. The company let him well before two years was up due to what it said was a reduction in headcount; even though he says that his stock options had vested, he never received them.
