Most popular video sharing platform TikTok became popular in a short span of time. This app is being used worldwide even by children below 13 years of age. This app is also in much more talk in India. The videos created on TikTok on the day the day is going viral. However, TikTok can increase troubles in the coming days.
Being popular all over the world, China’s video-sharing app has been fined $5.7 million by the USA for illegally collecting information about children below 13 years. The CEO of TikTok has agreed to give the fine to settle this case of privacy breach. Under the agreement with FTC, the company will have to delete all the videos of children under 13 years of age. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said on Wednesday that the app has illegally collected data related to children under the age of 13 years.
According to the reporting commission, this record is fine in case of child privacy. This penalty has been imposed by the US on video sharing app music.LY, which was merged with Tikak in August last year. Collected personal information such as name, e-mail address, and their location related to the children under the age of 13 years on the company.
Launched in 2014, this Musical.L.Y gave users the facility to upload short videos of popular songs. Most of the children’s accounts were created without the knowledge of their parents. To register on this app, people had to give their e-mail address, phone number, username, first and last name, brief information and profile picture. Prior to the merger with Tiktok, it had 6.5 million users in the US.
FTC said that the investigation revealed that despite the complaints of parents, the company did not complete the request to delete the information related to the children. It is known that TikTok is associated with the $ 75 billion startup bytedance. There are numerous million users worldwide. In recent times, TikTok has increased rapidly in other countries outside of China, faster than other Chinese social media companies.
In the case of child privacy in the US, fines have been imposed on other big technology companies before the ticket. Disney had a penalty of three million for collecting information related to children for online games in 2011. The company owned by Verizon was fined $ 5 million in December last year. The company was accused of using their cookies and geolocation data for online advertising focused on children under the age of 13 years.
