ByteDance: former executive accuses company of illegal practices – 05/13/2023 – Tech

A former ByteDance executive has filed a lawsuit in the United States against the company, which controls TikTok, accusing it of having fired him for having warned about alleged illegal practices.

Many Republican lawmakers want to ban TikTok in the United States. They claim the platform allows Beijing to collect users’ data without their consent and influence their opinion, which the app denies.

According to the lawsuit filed in a San Francisco court on May 1, Yintao Yu discovered shortly after being hired in California in 2017 that ByteDance was “stealing” videos posted on competing networks, such as Instagram and Snapchat, to post it. them on their own platform.

Yu, who was ByteDance’s head of US engineering at the time, said he warned his superiors, to no avail, “and the theft of intellectual property continued unabated.” He was fired in 2018.

On Friday, Yu filed a lawsuit accusing ByteDance of “serving as a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party” (CCP).

He claims to have seen the company highlight content “that expresses hatred for Japan” and restrict content “that expresses support for the Hong Kong protests” in favor of democracy.

According to the former employee, the PCC “had supreme permanent access to all company data, including data stored in the United States.”

“My client is the most senior ByteDance executive to speak publicly,” Charles Jung, his lawyer, told AFP on Saturday.

“My client is concerned about the protection of US users’ data, the ethical conduct of the app, and the well-being of ByteDance employees.”

Access to US users’ personal data has been at the center of rising tensions in recent years between authorities and the company, which has taken several steps to ensure that this data is stored on servers in the US.

The White House encourages TikTok to be acquired by an American company in order to remain in the country.

Neither ByteDance nor TikTok immediately responded to an AFP request.

Yu is seeking a court order to force the company to stop the practices mentioned in the lawsuit, as well as damages, of which he plans to allocate a “substantial portion” to civil rights organizations for Asian Americans.