Washington:
ByteDance has agreed to a $92 million class-action settlement to settle information privacy claims from some US TikTok customers, according to documents filed Thursday in US District Court in Illinois.
ByteDance, the Chinese enterprise that owns the brief video app that has more than one hundred million US customers, agreed to the settlement immediately after more than a year of litigation.
“While we disagree with the assertions, rather than go through lengthy litigation, we’d like to focus our efforts on building a safe and joyful experience for the TikTok community,” TikTok mentioned Thursday. The settlement nonetheless calls for court approval.
The lawsuits claimed the TikTok app “infiltrates its users’ devices and extracts a broad array of private data including biometric data and content that defendants use to track and profile TikTok users for the purpose of, among other things, ad targeting and profit.”
The settlement was reached immediately after “an expert-led inside look at TikTok’s source code” and in depth mediation efforts, according to the motion looking for approval of the settlement.
Separately, in Washington the Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Justice Department are hunting into allegations that TikTok failed to live up to a 2019 agreement aimed at guarding children’s privacy.
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