Fired ByteDance Exec Says China Exerted ‘Supreme’ Data Control

A former executive at TikTok parent ByteDance Inc. who was fired in 2018 said in a lawsuit that the Chinese Communist Party had a special office within the company that gave it “supreme access” to all data, a backdoor channel that he said persisted even after US user data was walled off from individual engineers in China.

In a complaint filed Friday in California state court, Yintao “Roger” Yu said he was terminated from his job as head of engineering in the US in retaliation for his complaints to supervisors about “brazenly unlawful conduct” at the company.

ByteDance called the ...