Chinese Communist Party members used a "god credential” at TikTok parent ByteDance to examine the personal data of civil rights activists and protesters in Hong Kong in order to identify and track them down, a former company executive said in a court filing.
Yintao "Roger” Yu, a former head of engineering in the U.S. for ByteDance, described a special committee of the Chinese government installed at the company’s Beijing offices that he said monitored all data on the platform, including that of users in the U.S., according to the filing.
"This was a backdoor to any barrier ByteDance had supposedly installed to protect data from the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance,” according to the filing in state court in San Francisco. The party’s "superuser credential,” also known as a "god credential,” was "commonly discussed between employees at various levels of the company, including senior executives,” Yu said.