Jigyasa Prashar
TikTok just agreed to resolve a$ 92 million class-action lawsuits, and everyone who used the app before September 30th this year may be eligible for compensation. TikTok’s stealthy attempt to modify its privacy policy in a way that permitted it to automatically gather troves of voice and facial data from U.S. customers was bared back in June. Plaintiffs accused TikTok and its now-defunct sibling app, Musical.ly, of using a” complex system of artificial intelligence to recognize facial features in users’ videos,” which the app additionally used to” determine the user’s age, race/ nationality, and gender to recommend content and profiles for the user to follow “in a series of 21 lawsuits, the majority of which were filed on behalf of minors. According to court documents applicable to the case,” by exploiting this sensitive and biometric information. “While failing to bear with the necessities for handling users’ biometric Tok maintains a competitive advantage over other social media apps and gains from its use of unlawfully attained data.”
The Biometric Information Privacy Act, which was filed inU.S. District Court in Illinois, gives citizens the ability to sue businesses that access their biometric data without their authorization.
Although ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, has denied breaking the law, it has decided to settle the lawsuits to avoid going to trial. TikTok announced the creation of a website, TikTokDataPrivacySettlement.com, where affected, eligible druggies over the age of 18 can lodge a claim by March 1, 2022, via an in-app banner announcement on Monday. Claimants can live anywhere in the United States, nonetheless, Illinois inhabitants may be eligible for up to six times further money. Around 80 million of TikTok’s 1 billion users are based in the United States, making them eligible to admit a portion of the agreement. Again, the agreement is$ 92 million, so if we are doing hot back-of-the-napkin arithmetic, that does not always equate to a large payout ( assuming everyone who’s eligible files a claim, of course). It’s also not a large sum of money for ByteDance, which is estimated to be worth$ 250 billion, according to Bloomberg.
According to NBC News, TikTok has agreed to stop revealing users’ data to third parties like Facebook and Google, as well as stop recording users’ facial features and tracking their whereabouts using GPS, as part of the settlement.