2023-05-14 15:28:58
A former manager of ByteDance – parent company of TikTok – in the United States is suing his ex-employer, whom he accuses of having dismissed him because he had given the alert on illegal practices of the company.
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, for put on his own services. Yintao Yu, who was head of engineering for ByteDance in the United States, would then have alerted his superiors, in vain, “and the theft of intellectual property continued unhindered”. He was fired in November 2018.
On Friday, the plaintiff filed an amended lawsuit that accuses ByteDance of “serving as a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party” (CCP). He said he saw ByteDance highlight content “that expressed hatred for Japan” and downvoted content “that expressed support for the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong”. Above all, according to the ex-employee, the CCP “had permanent supreme access to all company data, including data stored in the United States”.
Data Protection and “Ethical Acts”
The engineer seeks a court injunction to force the company to cease the practices mentioned in the complaint and damages of which he plans to pay a “substantial part” to civil rights organizations of Asian Americans . “My client is the most senior ByteDance official to speak publicly,” Charles Jung, his lawyer, told AFP on Saturday. “He is concerned about the protection of US user data, the app’s ethical behavior and the well-being of ByteDance employees.”
ByteDance intends to “fight vigorously” against “these baseless claims and accusations,” said a spokesperson for the company contacted by AFP. “Mr. Yu worked for ByteDance for less than a year (…) He was in charge of an app called Flipagram, which was taken off the market years ago for commercial reasons,” he said. added.
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. Many American elected officials want to ban TikTok in the country, believing that the platform allowed Beijing to collect user data without their knowledge and influence their opinion.
At the end of March, during a hearing in Congress, the boss of the application, Shou Chew, again affirmed that Beijing did not have access to the data of American users, without convincing all of the elected officials. The White House recently pushed TikTok to get bought out by an American company so it could stay in the United States.
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