(San Francisco) An anonymous responsable for ByteDance aux États-Unis pour suit en justice son ancien employer, la maison mère de TikTok, qu’il accuse de l’avoir license parce qu’il avait donné l’alerte sur des pratiques illégales de l’ ‘a company.
Many US elected officials want to ban TikTok in the US. They asserted that the popular platform allows Beijing to collect user data without their knowledge and influence their opinions, which the app has always denied.
According to the lawsuit filed in San Francisco District Court on 1any In May, Yintao Yu discovered shortly after her California assignment in the summer of 2017 that ByteDance had been “stealing” videos posted to rival networks, Instagram and Snapchat, to put on its own services.
Mr. Yu, who was the head of engineering at ByteDance in the US, had unsuccessfully alerted his superiors, “and the intellectual property theft continued without a hitch.” He was fired in November 2018.
On Friday, the plaintiff filed an amended lawsuit accusing ByteDance of “acting as a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party” (CCP).
Mr. Yu says he has seen ByteDance highlight content that “expresses hatred of Japan” and remove content “that expressed support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong”.
Above all, according to the former employee, CCP had “permanent and supreme access to all company data, including data stored in the United States.”
“My client is the most publicly speaking ByteDance official,” Charles Jung, his attorney, said on Saturday.
“My client is concerned about the protection of user data in the United States, the ethical conduct of the app, and the welfare of ByteDance employees.”
The issue of access to personal information of American users has been a source of growing tension for years between authorities and the company, which has taken several measures to ensure that this data is stored on servers in the United States.
At the end of March, during a congressional hearing, the head of TikTok, Xu Qiu, again claimed that Beijing did not have access to it. But many elected officials responded that they did not believe him.
The White House recently pushed TikTok to buy an American company so it can stay in the US.
ByteDance and TikTok did not immediately respond to a request from AFP.
Mr. Yu is seeking an injunction to force the company to stop the practices cited in the complaint and damages, of which he plans to pay “a significant portion” of Asian American civil rights organizations.
“Total coffee aficionado. Travel buff. Music ninja. Bacon nerd. Beeraholic.”
