The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.Get breaking news and insider analysis on the rapidly changing world of media and technology right to your inbox.FILE PHOTO: A man walks past a sign of Chinese company ByteDance's app TikTok, known locally as Douyin, at the International Artificial Products Expo in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China on Oct. 18, 2019. Hong and her legal representatives could not immediately be reached for comment.The allegations may deepen legal troubles in the United States for TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Technology.Get breaking news alerts and special reports. It has far surpassed this number in 2019, booking $7 billion to $8.4 billion in revenue in a better-than-expected result for the first half of 2019.” TikTok Inc has been hit with a proposed class action in federal court in California accusing the social media platform of collecting and storing users’ biometric data without their consent in violation of an Illinois biometric privacy law. The company may also be engaging in unknown practices to collect this data. To read the full story on Westlaw Practitioner Insights, click here: SAN FRANCISCO — A California college student has accused popular video-sharing app TikTok in a class-action lawsuit of transferring private user data to servers in … Sara Merken 1 Min Read TikTok Inc has been hit with a proposed class action in federal court in California accusing the social media platform of … According to a lawsuit filed in California against ByteDance and TikTok, “Beijing ByteDance had $7.2 billion in annual revenue for the year 2018.
A new legal filing has shed additional light on the massive privacy lawsuit that TikTok is facing for allegedly storing and using minors' facial data. TikTok Faces Biometric Information Privacy Lawsuit In May, as millions of quarantined and socially deprived Americans turned bored eyes to their smartphones, legal storms began to brew for TikTok, an app for sharing short-form mobile videos. SAN FRANCISCO — A California college student has accused popular video-sharing app TikTok in a class-action lawsuit of transferring private user data to servers in China, despite the company’s assurances that it does not store personal data there.The allegations may deepen legal troubles in the United States for TikTok, which is owned by Beijing ByteDance Technology Co but operates entirely outside of China and has developed an especially devoted fan base among U.S. teenagers.The company is already facing a U.S. government national security probe over concerns about data storage and possible censorship of political sensitive content.The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California last Wednesday and originally reported by The Daily Beast, alleges TikTok has surreptitiously “vacuumed up and transferred to servers in China vast quantities of private and personally-identifiable user data.”TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the allegations, but maintains that it stores all U.S. user data in the United States with backups in Singapore.The documents identify the plaintiff as Misty Hong, a college student and resident of Palo Alto, California, who downloaded the TikTok app in March or April 2019 but never created an account.Months later, she alleges, she discovered that TikTok had created an account for her without her knowledge and produced a dossier of private information about her, including biometric information gleaned from videos she created but never posted.According to the filing, TikTok transferred user data to two servers in China - bugly.qq.com and umeng.com - as recently as April 2019, including information about the user’s device and any websites the user had visited.Bugly is owned by Tencent, China’s largest mobile software company, which also owns social network WeChat, while Umeng is part of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group.The lawsuit also claims that source code from Chinese tech giant Baidu is embedded within the TikTok app, as is code from Igexin, a Chinese advertising service, which security researchers discovered in 2017 was enabling developers to install spyware on a user’s phone.The legal documents did not provide evidence of the data transfers or the existence of Baidu or Igexin source code in the app. TikTok and its parent ByteDance Inc. allegedly did not tell users they would collect their face scans, or the specific reason for collecting the biometric information, in violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, according to a complaint filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by guardians of two Illinois children who uploaded photos to the app and used facial filters in videos. TikTok agreed to the settlement after allegations that the app knowingly and illegally stored the names, email addresses, and locations of users under the age of 13. One California resident alleged in a lawsuit that she downloaded the TikTok app, but never made an account.