Chinese app TikTok is back in news for misusing data of it’s under aged users to gain advertising revenue from corporate clients. A 12-year-old girl from London has sued in the court that TikTok and its predecessor Musical.ly were processing information related to children just to gain ad revenues that was against the EU and UK data protection laws- set further even after Brexit.
Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner from England, will monitor the lawsuit remotely in court and will then intend to take action against the video sharing platform on behalf of all the under -16s being represented by barrister Charles Ciumei.
TikTok that has been downloaded over 1.8 billion times from Google and Apple’s App Store is yet to react to the lawsuit.
As per the legal suit, TikTok is using the collected personal data of its users to feed to machine learning tools that then target the user with relevant ads and content to capture their attention forever.
The 12-year-old claims that no one in the world are following the rules specified in the app’s terms of service that only users above 13 years to the use the app. The app is found collecting extensive information about its users like device information, IP address, photographs and videos being uploaded and date of births and user names that might pose as a great cyber threat if fallen into wrong hands into the future.
After hearing to the total proceeding, Mr. Justice Warby allowed the barrister to keep the name of the client under wraps as it could pose as a significant risk for the claimant and her family and could hinder their daily lives.
