TikTok: Former American manager of ByteDance accuses the company of stealing videos

A former manager of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is suing his former employer in the US, who he accuses of firing him because he warned of the company’s illegal activities.

According to a lawsuit filed in a San Francisco court on May 1, Yingtao Yu discovered shortly after he was hired in California in the summer of 2017 that ByteDance was “stealing” videos posted on rival networks, Instagram and Snapchat, to post on their own. own services. . Yingtao Yu, who was the head of development for ByteDance in the United States, would have warned his superiors in vain, “and the intellectual property theft continued unchecked.” He was fired in November 2018.

On Friday, the plaintiff filed an amended lawsuit accusing ByteDance of “serving as a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party” (CCP). He said he saw ByteDance highlighting content that “expresses hatred of Japan” and downplaying content “that expresses support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.” First of all, according to a former employee, the CCP “had constant superior access to all company data, including data held in the United States.”

Data Protection and Ethics Acts

The engineer is seeking an injunction to force the company to stop the practice cited in the complaint and pay damages, a “substantial portion” of which he plans to pay to Asian American civil rights organizations. “My client is the highest-ranking ByteDance official to speak in public,” his lawyer, Charles Jung, told AFP Saturday. “He is concerned about the data protection of US users, the ethical behavior of the app, and the well-being of ByteDance employees.”

ByteDance intends to “resolutely fight” “these baseless claims and allegations,” said a company spokesman contacted by AFP. “Mr. Yu worked at ByteDance for less than a year (…) He was in charge of an app called Flipagram, which was taken off the market a few years ago for commercial reasons,” he said.

The topic of access to the personal information of US users has been a source of growing tension for years between the authorities and the company, which has taken a number of measures to ensure that this data is stored on servers in the US. Many US 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 opinions.

At the end of March, during a congressional hearing, the head of the app, Shou Chu, reaffirmed that Beijing does not have access to US user data, without convincing all elected officials. The White House recently pushed TikTok to be bought out by an American company so it can stay in the United States.