His actions are clearly intended to garner media attention.” Yu has never raised these allegations in the five years since his employment for Flipagram was terminated in July 2018. “We plan to vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations in this complaint,” the statement said, adding that Yu’s employment at a ByteDance app known as Flipagram was terminated in 2018 after working for the company for less than a year. In a statement, a ByteDance spokesperson sought to discredit Yu’s claims as an opportunistic publicity grab. TikTok declined to comment on the allegation. The filing was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

“From the logs, I saw that the Committee accessed the protestors’, civil rights activists’, and supporters’ unique user data, locations, and communications.” “The Committee and external investigators used the god credential to identify and locate the Hong Kong protestors, civil rights activists, and supporters of the protests,” Yu alleged in the filing.

The declaration does not provide documentation, internal messages or other primary source materials to substantiate the claim.īut Yu, who pledged under penalty of perjury that he is telling the truth, alleges he viewed access logs showing that CCP officials - whom Yu described as part of a special “committee” with dedicated physical access to ByteDance’s Beijing offices - used a so-called “god credential” to bypass any privacy protections the company may have otherwise applied to the TikTok data. It is a sworn statement by Yu, who is suing ByteDance in a wrongful termination case in California state court. The evidence, such as it is, remains rather thin. US venture capital titan Sequoia to split off China business amid tension with Beijing (Photo via Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images). Signage with logo at headquarters of venture capital investment firm Sequoia Capital, on Sand Hill Road in the Silicon Valley town of Menlo Park, California, August 25, 2016.

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