Love it or hate it, TikTok is massive, with an estimated 1.1 billion+ active monthly users, and has been downloaded over 2.6 billion times. But with great power comes consequences if you’re caught out using that power for something less than savory. It appears TikTok has been accused of just that, and has recently faced a lawsuit over alleged privacy violations.
TikTok coughs it up
The Verge reports that TikTok has chosen to pay $92 million to settle the lawsuit, which combined 21 proposed lawsuits regarding an alleged variety of privacy violations, chief of which being that the app took personal user data to track users’ online presences and target ads towards them. Some accusations went so far as to claim that the app analyzed users faces with the intention of targeting ads towards them based on race, gender, and age. Recently, online privacy concerns have been garnering big media attention, but in particular Tech-giants have faced more and more fire for ad-tracking in the past few months.
TikTok denied all allegations but chose to settle the lawsuit to avoid a lengthy litigation, telling The Verge, “…we’d like to focus our efforts on building a safe and joyful experience for the TikTok community,” instead.
TikTok has also agreed to avoid behavior that infringes on user privacy, like storing and sharing private data, without making this known to them first in its privacy policy.
This isn’t the first time the social media titan has been pommeled for data scraping, unfortunately, and it seems to be an irresistible practice for massive online platforms. Hopefully, with a growing public concern for online privacy, it’s a trend that doesn’t stick around as long as the plethora of dance challenges you’re bound to see if you’ve got eyes and an internet connection.