SAN FRANCISCO – TikTok has agreed to pay US$92 million (RM373 million) in a deal to settle a cluster of US class-action suits accusing the video-sharing platform of invading the privacy of young users.
A legal filing yesterday in federal court in the state of Illinois urged a judge to approve the settlement, which includes TikTok being more transparent about data-gathering and better training employees on user privacy.
The litigation combined 21 class-action cases taking aim at TikTok and its China-based parent company, ByteDance.
“The TikTok app infiltrates its users’ devices and extracts a broad array of private data, including biometric data and content that defendants use to track and profile TikTok users for the purpose of, among other things, ad targeting and profit,” said Illinois lawyers in a filing.
They estimated that the settlement will apply to 89 million TikTok users in the United States, with most of them eligible for payouts of 96 cents each if they all filed claims for settlement money.
TikTok software identifies users’ faces to let people apply special effects to videos, but also gleans insights about age, gender and race for content recommendation and other features, said legal filings.
The lawyers also accused TikTok of sending or storing data in China, where its parent company is based.
The platform has denied any misuse of data, saying it only uses anonymous markers to detect where faces are and leaves that data on users’ devices, according to the legal paperwork.
The lawyers told the judge that ByteDance was motivated to settle due to pressure by US officials to sell TikTok.
The administration of President Joe Biden has reportedly shelved a plan by his predecessor, Donald Trump, to require the sale of TikTok to US tech giant Oracle, with Walmart as a retail partner.
Trump had aimed executive orders at TikTok and other Chinese online services allegedly posing security risks because of ties to Beijing.
A Trump administration move to ban downloads of TikTok has been stalled amid legal challenges.
The wildly popular app with an estimated 100 million US users has repeatedly defended itself against allegations of data transfers to the Chinese government, saying it stores user information on servers in the US and Singapore.
Early last year, Facebook agreed to pay US$550 million to settle a suit accusing it of gathering facial recognition data in violation of an Illinois privacy law. – AFP, February 27, 2021
