Within the next year, China’s ByteDance expectedly will join the stock exchange. TikTok, already popular with both children and adults, has seen explosive growth. The company marked this whooping growth in the past few years thanks to pandemic of complaints. ByteDance’s shares traded on a stock market that operates outside of official channels. This can put the company’s market capitalization at over $100 billion.
TikTok had 2 billion downloads in April. The platform marked 315 million downloads in the first quarter, making it the largest by a longshot.
Zhang Yiming is the former Microsoft executive who founded ByteDance in 2012. Five years later paid $1 billion to buy Musical.ly, also a popular video app among kids in China. TikTak utilizes Musical.ly’s services as a way of creating short personal videos. The users can share on the Internet while under the name Douyin.
TikTok has been gaining a lot of attention among children. Some operators, though, worry about the personal data it collects from users to then sell on third party companies.
Accusations on ByteDance
A few days ago, twenty US agencies accused ByteDance of violating children’s privacy laws and of breaking a settlement agreement last year with the US Federal Trade Commission based on previous complaints. TikTok has been under scrutiny for a while, as through the platform malicious users would distribute child pornography. The Dutch data protection watchdog announced that they were opening an investigation in light of this.
If you’ve been following the news, ByteDance has just agreed to a $5.7 million Settlement with the FTC for Musical.ly’s actions before the integration into TikTok. Musical.ly recieved accusation of collecting data on children who are under the age of thirteen, which is illegal according to the recently updated Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. TikTok has begun deleting their app from people in the US under the age of thirteen. Twenty carriers have now filed a complaints with the FTC which alleges that ByteDance violate their terms of use and is still allowing children under 13 to use TikTok, and is also collecting data from the app’s use in order to resell it.
India’s Supreme Court banned TikTok, a social media platform of the video calling app Musical.ly, due to fears that it could cause harm to minors. ByteDance promised to help address the problem and lifted the ban about a month later.
Campaigns on the platform
Even though ByteDance doesn’t report its revenue publicly, it is likely that the company’s mobile app TikTok also has advertising revenue. Its reported user numbers and tracking data could provide useful information to help advertisers target potential users with their ads. Many companies ask ByteDance to run targeted campaigns for them through TikTok. In these campaigns, people share personal moments on YouTube that are expressed with a hashtag assigned by the advertiser.
For example, clothing company Guess Jeans was one of the first to leverage TikTok with an ad campaign that encouraged users to upload videos in which they changed clothes with the hashtag “InMyDenim”. TikTok experienced a huge surge in popularity around 2014 and was estimated to have gained over 100 million users. This company is also a popular commercial partner of the company.
Breach of privacy
According to the Financial Times, the 20 entities that filed with the FTC claim that “a year after the settlement agreement, with children and families signing up for the app in record numbers, TikTok has not moved to delete personal information it had previously collected from children and continues to collect children’s personal information without informing or asking their parents’ permission.”
TikTok responded with a statement on why privacy is important and what we can do to help make it a safe and entertaining community.” United States Congress rightly brought TikTok’s lack of parental consent and other unfair characteristics to light. Since ByteDance is so influential, they now have to forcedly develop fair methods, but still have a lot of work to do. (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act). Companies like Instagram are able to identify accounts which had the “child under 13” issue in its early stages. As part of their settlement agreement, people who create false identities on Instagram can face fines or jail time.
Many people believe that TikTok’s action is seen as an aggressive form of Internet companies’ actions, since it involves minors. They are using data about people’s behavior on the Internet and in the real world and giving it to other companies without their consent or knowledge(e.g., by recording the routes they take each day, the hours they browse the Internet, online purchases, etc.) to reap billions of dollars. One of the most prominent theories on how big data is fundamentally changing the world and our economy is described in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.
The TikTok case adds to earlier cases of reselling data collected from minors to companies engaged in targeted advertising campaigns. Last year, as the Financial Times recalls in the same article, Google paid $170 million in a settlement agreement with the FTC to address allegations that it violated the Coppa law and collected personal data from children using YouTube.
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Author: PC-GR
The World of Technology
