HONG KONG — A former executive at ByteDance, the Chinese company which owns the popular short-video app TikTok, says in a legal filing that some members of the ruling Communist Party used data held by the company to identify and locate protesters in Hong Kong.
The credential acted as a"backdoor to any barrier ByteDance had supposedly installed to protect data from the C.C.P's surveillance," the filing says. "We plan to vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations in this complaint," ByteDance said. TikTok is under intense scrutiny in the U.S. and worldwide over how it handles data and whether it poses a national security risk. Some American lawmakers have expressed concern that TikTok's ties to ByteDance means the data it holds is subject to Chinese law.
To allay such concerns, TikTok has said that it would work with Oracle to store all U.S. data within the country.