TikTok Faces More Legal Challenges in the United States; this time, it’s from the state of Indiana, which has filed a lawsuit against the app. Its parent company, ByteDance, allegedly broke consumer protection laws and, more specifically, for failing to protect children’s privacy adequately.
According to a BBC report:
Indiana filed two lawsuits on Wednesday. The first one says that children using the app are at risk of being exposed to adult material. In its second lawsuit, Indiana also claims TikTok conceals the Chinese government’s access to users’ private data.
According to the lawsuit, TikTok is a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” that exposes children to “a range of improper material.” “Deceives and misleads” users about the threats to their data.
Similarly, TikTok has been criticized for allegedly promoting hazardous material and temporarily banned in other countries. Recent instances of adverse difficulties have heightened concerns on this issue. At least 10 incidents of teenage users dying from participating in risky trends like “The Blackout Challenge” were uncovered by a Bloomberg investigation.
This is in addition to the more considerable worries about data privacy, for which the app is still under CFIUS review. U.S. legislators continue to argue over whether the Chinese-owned app should continue operating inside the U.S.
TikTok is available in over 150 countries, has over 1 billion users, and has been downloaded over 210 million times in the United States alone. If your brand’s target audience includes anyone between 13 and 60, you should be on TikTok.
With high-profile security officials sounding the alarm, pressure remains high on TikTok. Even though it seems like it would take a significant escalation for the app to be banned outright, that is still a possibility. The threat of total removal from the U.S., and likely other markets, looms at all times.
The director of the FBI, Chris Wray, joined FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr and Republican senator Josh Hawley in expressing their worries about the data collection practices of the app TikTok last month, saying that they constitute a danger to national security. As the Biden Administration oversees its lengthy review of the platform, Republican Senators, in particular, have continued to raise questions about it, even though the study has been plagued by delays and setbacks and is now rumored to be highly unlikely to be completed by the end of the year.
It may suggest that TikTok be banned in the United States.
It’s important to remember that opinions may shift rapidly. With so many security professionals raising red flags about the app, combined with the difficulties associated with underage exposure, there’s a degree of underlying worry that might surface at any moment.
TikTok has more than a billion subscribers and is rapidly being utilized as a search engine and a news source. Mainly by younger viewers, so it’s essential to ask about these issues before it’s too late.
It was only in hindsight that the impact of Russian activists on Facebook was fully appreciated. Those sounding the alarm about TikTok say we must take preventative measures this time.
Report Accusing Bytedance of Attempted Surveillance Raise Privacy Concerns
Forbes published an alarming Tiktok monitoring article in October 2022, alleging that the firm intended to utilize the app to track the whereabouts of some U.S. citizens.
The publication claims that ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control. Which generally examines suspected misconduct by current and past workers who had intended to gather data for someone with no connection to the firm.
“This TikTok monitoring report states that neither TikTok nor ByteDance responded to concerns regarding whether Internal Audit had targeted any members of the U.S. government, activists, public personalities, or journalists. However, Forbes’s analysis of the available information suggests that ByteDance’s Internal Audit team intended to utilize the collected location data for surveillance purposes. Instead of ad targeting or other applications above. To safeguard its sources, Forbes is not sharing specifics about the monitoring it intends to conduct.
ByteDance refuted the rumor, claiming that the software has never been used to target “members of the U.S. government or journalists” and does not gather “precise” GPS data to follow users.
TikTok and its parent firm, Beijing-based ByteDance, have complete access to your data, according to two studies acquired by TheWrap.
Hackers intentionally breach systems to discover vulnerabilities and warn the public. White hat security researchers conducted the analyses. The publication claims that five outside specialists double-checked their results.
These claims are consistent with information from other reliable sources. URL Genius, a marketing firm, discovered that TikTok and YouTube capture the most valuable data.
TikTok, unlike YouTube, which gathers your data for Google, permits third-party trackers on its site. Even when you exit Tiktok, those third-party trackers will continue to monitor your online behavior. As a result, you have yet to learn what happens to your data after it leaves TikTok.
