TikTok hit with class-action lawsuit over child protection that could cost billions PixabayTikTok has been hit with a class-action lawsuit that, if successful, could cost the company billions. The former Children\u2019s Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, has brought a legal claim against TikTok for allegedly illegally processing the personal information of millions of children. The case is part of a class-action lawsuit. The lawsuit claims that TikTok and its parent company ByteDance are \u201cdeliberately violating UK and EU children\u2019s data protection law.\u201d Specifically, they claim TikTok does not have consent to take and process children\u2019s data, and that it collects that data without sufficient warning. TikTok was fined $5.7 million in February 2019 by the US Federal Trade Commission for the way the app it bought, Musical.ly, handled children\u2019s data. South Korea\u2019s media watchdog fined TikTok \u00a3123,000 for collecting the data of 6,000 children under the age of 14 in July 2020. Following its US fine, TikTok introduced a feature to verify the age of its child users worldwide. In a press release announcing the lawsuit, Longfield and the law firm taking on the case incorrectly claimed the age verification features are only available in the United States. TikTok asked to delete child user data Longfield, who is supporting the claim by law firm Scott + Scott, wants TikTok to delete its UK and European child users\u2019 information, and to pay them compensation. \u201cTikTok is a data collection service that is thinly-veiled as a social network,\u201d says Longfield. \u201cIt has deliberately and successfully deceived parents, whose best intentions are to protect their children and children themselves.\u201d Longfield and Scott + Scott allege that children\u2019s telephone numbers, videos, pictures, and their location, along with biometric data, are collected by TikTok. The suit claims that every child user that has used TikTok since 25 May 2018 has had their data scooped up in this way. \u201cThe information collected by TikTok represents a severe breach of UK and EU data protection law,\u201d says Tom Southwell, partner at Scott + Scott. \u201cChildren do not understand how exposed they are when they use the app, and parents have been deliberately left in the dark by TikTok. \u201cTikTok and ByteDance\u2019s advertising revenue is built on the personal information of its users, including children,\u201d adds Southwell. \u201cProfiting from this information without fulfilling its legal obligations, and its moral duty to protect children online, is unacceptable.\u201d ByteDance accused of \u2018shadowy practices\u2019 Internal data uncovered by the New York Times indicates that as of spring 2020, 43% of TikTok\u2019s users were classified as being 14 or under. One in three German users at the time were also believed to be under 14, and 45% of French users. Longfield and Southwell both claim that TikTok\u2019s company structure, which has a European headquarters in London which reports into a Cayman Islands-located parent company, is \u201cdeliberately opaque\u201d. \u201cParents and children have a right to know that private information, including phone numbers, physical location, and videos of their children are being illegally collected,\u201d says Longfield. \u201cTikTok appears set on making it as difficult as possible for millions of mothers and fathers to know who is benefiting from this information. \u201cWe want to put a stop to TikTok\u2019s shadowy data collection practices, and demand that they delete all private information that has been illegally processed when children use the app.\u201d The law firm and Longfield are inviting the parents of 3.5 million UK children who believe they may have been affected to sign up to the suit. TikTok: privacy & safety \u2018priorities\u2019 Some child safety experts are nonplussed by the action. \u201cUnless they have new evidence that has eluded the experts, it feels like another attempt at targeting the new kid in the class,\u201d says Eva Fog Noer, a Danish child safety expert. A TikTok spokesperson said: \u201cPrivacy and safety are top priorities for TikTok and we have robust policies, processes and technologies in place to help protect all users, and our teenage users in particular. We believe the claims lack merit and intend to vigorously defend the action.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
TikTok hit with class-action lawsuit over child protection that could cost billions PixabayTikTok has been hit with a class-action lawsuit that, if successful, could cost the company billions. The former Children\u2019s Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, has brought a legal claim against TikTok for allegedly illegally processing the personal information of millions of children. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}