What just happened?
“Today we are filing a complaint in federal court challenging the Administration's efforts to ban Tik-Tok in the US”.[1] Tik-Tok’s lawsuit alleges that the Trump administration has violated due process protections, exceeds the scope of sanction rules, and offers no evidence that proves Tik-Tok presents a national security threat.[2]
What does this mean?
Whether it was the ‘Tiger King’ phase or the ‘let’s bake banana bread’ phase, we all clung tightly to something to keep our brains stimulated, or perhaps not so stimulated, during the coronavirus lockdown. But one particular app that kept us all entertained through the entire quarantine period and that fast became a global phenomenon, was Tik-Tok.
Even if you didn’t make your own account, and spend hours choreographing a complex dance routine or playing endless pranks on your family to get a couple of hundred hits, you’d probably have known someone who did. And if you didn’t, well, you may be living underneath a rock. However, recently there has been growing controversy surrounding the world-wide phenomenon that is Tik-Tok, and what the intentions surrounding the fun-filled, family-friendly, app truly are.
“With over 80 million monthly users, in the USA alone”[3] it’s difficult to imagine the devastating impact that many users could face, if they could no longer spend hours scrolling endlessly through their favourite videos. But surely that wouldn’t happen, right? Wrong. Last week President of the USA, Donald Trump made that fear a reality. Trump declared that those same 80 million monthly users, would endure a life without Tik-Tok in 45 days’ time, due to growing fears that the app is linked to the Chinese government.[4]
Despite Tik-Tok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, declining the accusations stating; “Tik-Tok is not used in China, and the data collated is stored outside of China in Singapore”[5] the application that is taking the world by storm, is trapped in the middle of the worsening diplomatic relationship, between America and China. However, the US is not the first country to place a ‘ban’ on downloading the app that has been installed over 1.5 billion times, since it emerged on the social media scene in late 2019. India, ultimately, set the ball rolling after the app was linked to numerous deaths and accused of breaching privacy laws and breaching child data protection regulations, resulting in a multitude of fines.[6]
It can be a little bit confusing to keep up with what exactly Tik-Tok does, what its potential links to China are, and the true intentions behind the multi-billion-pound app. But recent evidence provided by the Independent states; ‘Tik-Tok can retrieve data including your name, address, password, social media accounts, payment details, and even your personal photos, to just scratch the surface.[7] So, in some respects, it’s understandable why the Trump administration has growing concerns over the application and where the seeds of Tik-Tok are actually watered.
As a result of the controversy, Trump, signed an executive order earlier this week, which would require both Google and Apple to remove Tik-Tok from their app stores and has since given the Microsoft Corp a 45-day time scale to negotiate the acquisition of Tik-Tok, in order to secure a deal for the US to own the app.[8]
How does it impact the legal sector?
The dispute surrounding Tik-Tok has had a huge impact on the legal sector, due to it’s nature of breaching Data Protection Regulations.
But most notably Tik-Tok faced a lawsuit from an American College student who claimed her data has been transferred to multiple Chinese servers.[9] Lawyers that represented the Tik-Tok victim, Misty Hong, described the activity of the app as “unjustly profiting from the secret harvesting of private and personally-identifiable user data, among other things such as advertisement targeting.”[10] And unfortunately this was just the beginning.
Now over 20 federal lawsuits have been filed across the United States for exactly the same reasoning as that of Hong. Breaching data protection. Parents of minors in California and Illinois, to name a few, have sought-out legal help to sue the worldwide phenomenon that has collected personal information and identification from their minors, and I can’t imagine that these 20 will be the last.[11]
While the final chimes of Tik-Tok are beginning to be sung worldwide, it seems the legal sector will continue to flourish with further cases much like that of Hong.
Written by Emily Kavanagh
Assessing Firms: #HowardKennedyLLP #TraversSmithLLP #MacFarlanesLLP #HoganLovells #HerbertSmithFreehills #DLAPiper #IrwinMitchell #BurgesSalmonLLP #White&CaseLLP #AkinGump #Bird&Bird #Dentons
References:
[1] ‘Why we are suing the Administration’ (Tik Tok,, 24th August 2020)
[2] Adi Robertson, ‘TikTok sues Trump administration over US ban’ (The Verge, 24th August 2020)
[3]Dan Keane, ‘Will Tiki-Tok be banned in the UK?’ (The Sun, 2nd August 2020) https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12061113/tik-tok-banned-uk/ <Accessed 6th August 2020>
[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/tiktok-ban-us-trump-why-will-it-happen-remove-app-what-countries-a9618931.html < Accessed 8th August 2020>
[4] ComAware, ‘Tik-tok security saga deepns’ (Commerical Awareness for Students, 2nd August 2020) https://comaware.net/2020/08/02/top-10-stories-of-last-week-27-07-2020/ <Accessed 7th August 2020 >
[5] Dan Keane, ‘Will Tiki-Tok be banned in the UK?’ (The Sun, 2nd August 2020) https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12061113/tik-tok-banned-uk/ <Accessed 6th August 2020>
[6] Rebecca Jennings, ‘What’s going on with tik-tok, China and the US Government’(Vox, 16th December 2019) https://www.vox.com/open-sourced/2019/12/16/21013048/tiktok-china-national-security-investigation < Accessed 7th August 2020 >
[7] Adam Smith, ‘Tik-tok Ban: is it going to happen in the US and why is Trump considering it?’ (The Independent, 7th August 2020) https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/tiktok-ban-us-trump-why-will-it-happen-remove-app-what-countries-a9618931.html < Accessed 8th August 2020>
[8] ComAware, ‘Tik-tok security saga deepns’ (Commerical Awareness for Students, 2nd August 2020) https://comaware.net/2020/08/02/top-10-stories-of-last-week-27-07-2020/ <Accessed 7th August 2020 >
[9] Rebecca Jennings, ‘What’s going on with tik-tok, China and the US Government’(Vox, 16th December 2019) https://www.vox.com/open-sourced/2019/12/16/21013048/tiktok-china-national-security-investigation < Accessed 7th August 2020 >
[10] Zheping Huang ‘China’s TikTok Sued by U.S. College Student Over Data Use’ (Bloomberg, 3rd December 2019) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-03/china-s-tiktok-sued-by-u-s-college-student-over-data-use < Accessed 7th August 2020>
[11]Bobby Allyn ‘Class-Action Lawsuit Claims TikTok Steals Kids' Data And Sends It To China’ (NPR, 4th August 2020) https://www.npr.org/2020/08/04/898836158/class-action-lawsuit-claims-tiktok-steals-kids-data-and-sends-it-to-china?t=1597175291575 <Accessed 8th August 2020>
Disclaimer: This article (and any information accessed through links in this article) is provided for information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.