The case is enough to revive the debate on the supervision of the Chinese social network TikTok. While many American elected officials want to ban the platform from the country, a former employee of ByteDance, the parent company of the social network, has just filed a complaint against TikTok. He claims to have been fired by his former employer after having given the alert on certain illegal practices of the company on American territory.
An accusation of “theft of intellectual property”
According to the lawsuit filed in a San Francisco court on May 1, Yintao Yu discovered shortly after being hired in California in the summer of 2017 that ByteDance was “stealing” videos posted on competing networks, Instagram and Snapchat, to put them on his own services. Yintao Yu, then head of engineering for ByteDance in the United States, would have alerted his hierarchy. In vain: “the theft of intellectual property continued unhindered”, he indicated. He was fired in November 2018.
On Friday, May 12, the plaintiff filed an amended lawsuit in which he accuses ByteDance of “serving as a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party” (CCP). The former engineer said he saw the social network highlight content “that expressed hatred for Japan” and relegate content “that expressed support for the demonstrations in Hong Kong” in favor of democracy. Above all, according to the ex-employee, the CCP “had permanent supreme access to all company data, including data stored in the United States”.
US User Data Protection Alert
ByteDance intends to “fight vigorously” against “these baseless claims and accusations”, said a spokesperson for the company, asked by Agence France Presse. “Mr. Yu worked for ByteDance for less than a year […] He was running an app called Flipagram, which was taken off the market years ago for commercial reasons,” he added.
“My client is the most senior ByteDance official to speak publicly,” Charles Jung, his lawyer, told AFP on Saturday. “He is concerned about the privacy of US users’ data, the app’s ethical behavior and the well-being of ByteDance employees.”
The subject of access to the personal information of American users has been a source of growing tension for years between the authorities and the company, which has taken several measures to ensure that this data is stored on servers in the United States. The White House recently encouraged TikTok to be acquired by an American company in order to be able to stay in the United States.