TikTok Is Being Sued For Allegedly Collecting Children's Personal Information

TikTok is being sued for illegally collecting the personal information of the children that used the application without their consent.

The former Children’s Commissioner for Britain, Anne Longfield filed the complaint against TikTok. Longfield is seeking more than 1 billion pounds in damages from TikTok and its parent company ByteDance. She alleged that the smartphone application was a data collection service under the guise of being a social media network. In a statement, she said that “We want to put a stop to TikTok’s shadowy data collection practices.”

The lawsuit accused the application of harvesting children’s information including telephone numbers, videos, pictures, location, biometric data, browsing history, etc. without sufficient consent and transparency required by law. The claim was launched on behalf of all the children who used the application since May 25, 2018, regardless of whether they have an account or their privacy settings.

The website announcing the lawsuit said, “TikTok is deliberately opaque about who has access to children’s private information.”

The lawsuit stated it was suing to stop the application from processing the information of children and deleting all of the information on minors. It also aims to have the children affected compensated. It has been accused of violating the UK Data Protection Act 2018 and UK General Data Protection Regulation for failing to provide safeguards to prevent the illegal processing of children’s data.

A spokesperson responded to the claim and stated it lacks merit. The spokesperson said they intended to “vigorously defend the action”. The spokesperson said, “Privacy and safety are top priorities for TikTok and we have robust policies, processes and technologies in place to protect all users, and our teenage users in particular.”

TikTok has more than 800 million users worldwide and ByteDance made billions in profits in 2020. Most of that money came from advertising.