TikTok’s parent company Byte Dance has allegedly violated child privacy laws and has collected the data of young users through the social media application. In the Class Action Complaint, the United States district court for the northern district of Illinois eastern division stated, “Defendants had actual knowledge they were collecting personally identifiable information and/or viewing data from children. The youth of the user base is easily apparent in perusing users’ profile pictures and in reviewing users’ profiles, many of which explicitly noted the child’s age, birth date, or school”.
Moreover, the complaint also states that the ‘defendant’ (Byte Dance) has received over 300 complaints in a period of two weeks in September 2016. “Moreover, since at least 2014, Defendants received thousands of complaints from parents of children under the age of 13 who were registered users of Defendants’ online service. In just a two-week period in September 2016, Defendants received over 300 complaints from parents asking that their child’s account be deleted,” read the complaint.
Meanwhile, Tik Tok’s spokesperson said that they came to know about the complaint very recently, and are working with the concerned people in order to resolve the issue. Furthermore, the spokesperson also said that the brand disagrees with most of the allegations that have been put on them. Tik Tok which was formerly known as Musical.ly was acquired by Byte Dance in the year 2017. It is byte dance which rebranded Musical.ly to Tik Tok, after which the app went viral.
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