Former ByteDance Executive Claims Chinese Communist Party Accessed TikTok’s Hong Kong User Data

A former executive at ByteDance, the parent company of the hit video-sharing app TikTok, alleges in a legal filing that a committee of China’s Communist Party members accessed the data of TikTok users in Hong Kong in 2018—a contention the company denies. 

The former executive claims the committee members focused on civil rights activists and protesters in Hong Kong during that time and accessed TikTok data that included their network information, SIM card identifications and IP addresses, in an effort to identify and locate the users. The former executive of the Beijing-based company said the data also included the users’ communications on TikTok.