A former US-based executive of ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), the Chinese company that owns TikTok, has sued it for wrongful dismissal, saying he was fired for sounding the alarm over what he called its “culture of lawlessness.”
The suit, filed by Yu Yin-tao (余英濤) in San Francisco, California, comes as political pressure has been growing in the US to ban TikTok.
Critics said the popular platform allows Beijing to covertly collect users’ data and influence their opinions — something the company denies.
Photo: Reuters
In his suit, Yu said that he discovered shortly after being hired in 2017 that ByteDance “was stealing” videos published on rival sites such as Instagram and Snapchat and presenting them as its own.
Yu, who was ByteDance’s US head of engineering, said he notified company leaders about the problem, but the “intellectual property infringement continued unabated.”
He was fired in November 2018.
Yu on Friday last week submitted an amendment to his original complaint — which was filed on May 1 — accusing ByteDance of serving “as a useful propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party.”
He said he had seen ByteDance give prominence to content expressing “hatred for Japan,” while playing down posts supporting pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
Yu said that Chinese government officials had a unit in the US office that “maintained supreme access to all the company data, even data stored in the United States.”
“My client is the most senior executive at ByteDance to come forward publicly,” Yu’s lawyer Charles Jung said on Saturday.
“My client is concerned about protecting American user data, about the ethical operations of the app and the wellbeing of ByteDance’s employees,” he said.
The issue of access to personal data on US users has aroused growing concern among US authorities. The company said it stores that data only on US-based servers.
The White House recently threatened to ban TikTok in the US unless ByteDance sold it to a US company.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) would not produce its most advanced technologies in the US next year, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. Kuo made the comment during an appearance at the legislature, hours after the chipmaker announced that it would invest an additional US$100 billion to expand its manufacturing operations in the US. Asked by Taiwan People’s Party Legislator-at-large Chang Chi-kai (張啟楷) if TSMC would allow its most advanced technologies, the yet-to-be-released 2-nanometer and 1.6-nanometer processes, to go to the US in the near term, Kuo denied it. TSMC recently opened its first US factory, which produces 4-nanometer
GREAT SUCCESS: Republican Senator Todd Young expressed surprise at Trump’s comments and said he expects the administration to keep the program running US lawmakers who helped secure billions of dollars in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing rejected US President Donald Trump’s call to revoke the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, signaling that any repeal effort in the US Congress would fall short. US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who negotiated the law, on Wednesday said that Trump’s demand would fail, while a top Republican proponent, US Senator Todd Young, expressed surprise at the president’s comments and said he expects the administration to keep the program running. The CHIPS Act is “essential for America leading the world in tech, leading the world in AI [artificial
REACTIONS: While most analysts were positive about TSMC’s investment, one said the US expansion could disrupt the company’s supply-demand balance Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) new US$100 billion investment in the US would exert a positive effect on the chipmaker’s revenue in the medium term on the back of booming artificial intelligence (AI) chip demand from US chip designers, an International Data Corp (IDC) analyst said yesterday. “This is good for TSMC in terms of business expansion, as its major clients for advanced chips are US chip designers,” IDC senior semiconductor research manager Galen Zeng (曾冠瑋) said by telephone yesterday. “Besides, those US companies all consider supply chain resilience a business imperative,” Zeng said. That meant local supply would
BIG INVESTMENT: Hon Hai is building the world’s largest assembly plant for servers based on Nvidia Corp’s state-of-the-art AI chips, Jalisco Governor Pablo Lemus said The construction of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co’s (鴻海精密) massive artificial intelligence (AI) server plant near Guadalajara, Mexico, would be completed in a year despite the threat of new tariffs from US President Donald Trump, Jalisco Governor Pablo Lemus said. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), is investing about US$900 million in what would become the world’s largest assembly plant for servers based on Nvidia Corp’s state-of-the-art GB200 AI chips, Lemus said. The project consists of two phases: the expansion of an existing Hon Hai facility in the municipality of El Salto, and the construction of a
RSS