TikTok
The Consumers’ Association and the Take Back Your Privacy Foundation (TBYP) are suing the parent company behind the social media app TikTok. They want the company to pay compensation to Dutch children for violating their privacy. In addition, TikTok must stop collecting personal data and destroy all personal data obtained illegally.
The claim amounts to a total of 2 billion euros: 1500 for each child under the age of 13 when they started using the app, 1250 euros for each child who was then 13, 14 or 15 years old and 1000 euros for each child who was 16 or 17 years old. used to be.
The association and the foundation also want TikTok to transfer the profits earned thanks to Dutch children to the children. It is unclear how big that amount is. In 2020, ByteDance, the Chinese parent company behind TikTok, made more than 16 billion euros worldwide profit, according to prosecutors.
Cookies and Algorithms
“The annoying thing about this app is that TikTok does everything to collect your private data while you watch videos, but also if you have that app on your phone at all,” said Joyce Donat of the Consumers’ Association in the statement. NOS Radio 1 News. “Then the cookies and the algorithms start to do their job. Then they scrape all the information they can get from your device. And that is shared with third parties and it is unclear what exactly happens to that private data.”
Talks about compensation of 1.5 billion euros came to nothing. They do make small promises, Donat said. “But the problem is that they collect an unimaginable amount of data from those users and that they violate all the rules that exist: the GDPR privacy law, the cookie law, the consumer law law. They don’t want to do anything about that, because they earn a lot of money with it. .”
According to Donat, the fact that the case is in the Netherlands should not be a problem. TikTok is also being tackled in the US and the UK for the same reason, she said. “It’s actually good if TikTok is attacked from all sides. They will still feel the pressure to move, we hope, and abide by the rules. We are not against TikTok, but against the way they follow the privacy rules. violation. That needs to be addressed.”
Last month TikTok was fined 750,000 euros by the Dutch Data Protection Authority. The platform has violated the privacy of young children by showing them the privacy rules in English only from May 2018 to July 2020. This has been adjusted after July 2020.
Stories made this video about privacy and TikTok
