A California college student has filed a lawsuit against the Chinese video-sharing app TikTok, alleging that the company illegally transferred private user data to China, according to Reuters.
What Happened
Misty Hong, a college student from Palo Alto, California, downloaded the TikTok app in spring 2019, according to the lawsuit. She never created an account with the app, but months later discovered that TikTok already made an account for her, without her consent.
She also found that the account contains her personal and biometric information taken from the videos she made but never posted to the TikTok platform, according to the lawsuit. Hong also alleged in the lawsuit that TikTok and its parent company ByteDance secretly “vacuumed up and transferred to servers in China vast quantities of private and personally-identifiable user data,” says the lawsuit, initially reported by The Daily Beast, according to Reuters.
Why It Matters
TikTok earlier came under the scrutiny of the US army for security risks. The company, however, responded that allegations of illegal data collection brought against them were false.
What’s Next
TikTok did not provide any comments on the charges brought against them but continues to insist that they store all their private user data in the U.S. itself with backups in Singapore.
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