TikTok has agreed to pay a $92 million to settle a lawsuit over a privacy violation.
Yep, $92 million will have to be paid because apparently TikTok collected “highly sensitive personal data” that would aid in help in refining their ads to their target market. However TikTok denied the allegations but chose to pay the money instead of litigating the issue, sounds like they are pretty rich to me right?
A TikTok statement that was sent to the verge read:
“While we disagree with the assertions, rather than go through lengthy litigation, we’d like to focus our efforts on building a safe and joyful experience for the TikTok community,”
Privacy violations.
The allegations charged against TikTok included analyzing users’ faces to determine their ethnicity, gender and age to supposed violations of the computer fraud and abuse act over its transmission of private data. Nearly all US users would be included in the settlement.
What else will TikTok not be doing?
Since TikTok may have breached some serious data privacy laws they have been forced to avoid several behaviours that could compromise data privacy such as storing biometric information, collecting GPS or clipboard data, and sending or storing US users’ data outside the country.
TikTok did not confirm if they currently violate any of the data laws but agreed on the terms they were given.
In 2019 TikTok had to pay $5.7 million to the federal trade commission when they were accused over alleged children’s privacy allegations and over accusations that its predecessor Musically failed to gain parental approval for young users.
It is quite evident that the company probably had something to hide that they didn’t want to unearth during a lengthy court case that would also take a lot more money and someone would probably go to jail. Question is, what are they hiding?