TikTok Agrees to Pay $92 Million to Settle Class-Action Lawsuit Alleging Privacy Violations

By Todd Spangler
25 February 2021

Excerpt

The class-action lawsuit contended that the app collected and disclosed personal data in violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), the federal Video Privacy Protection Act, and other consumer and privacy protection laws. According to the suit, among other things TikTok failed to notify users that the app’s filters and effects use facial scans — and that such biometric data was stored and used without their consent for various purposes, including for serving targeted ads.

TikTok “unjustly profit[ed] from the secret harvesting of this massive array of private and personally identifiable TikTok user data and content by using it for targeted advertising” and other purposes, according to the plaintiffs’ complaint (available at this link).

The lawsuit also alleged that the TikTok app “clandestinely vacuumed up and transferred to servers in China (and to other servers accessible from within China) vast quantities of private and personally identifiable user data and content that could be employed to identify, profile, and track the physical and digital location and activities of United States users now and in the future.”

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