08-06-2024, 04:27 PM
I am learning about the U.S. Department of Justice's case against TikTok... where there press releases allege a "massive-scale invasion of children's privacy."
This of course, is all something that had been 'not explicitly regulated' until 1998 when the legislature finally made a call and passed the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA)... From that point forward, any website operation online was lawfully required to conduct their data collection within specific parameters...
Briefly, COPPA created an obligation necessary to operate within our region... and apparently TikTok, by virtue of the primacy of it's corporate existence, resisted fulfilling that obligation (ostensibly until now.) Billions have been poured into lobbying against this obligation, not just by TikTok, but by others as well.
From ArsTechnica: DOJ sues TikTok, alleging “massive-scale invasions of children’s privacy”
...That's concerning because after the kids create the general account, TikTok then gathers even more information—"including usage information, device information, location data, image and audio information, metadata, and data from cookies and similar technologies that track users across different websites and platforms"—while allegedly turning a blind eye to kids dodging age-gates. In some cases prior to 2022, the DOJ alleged, TikTok allowed kids to create non-Kids Mode accounts by using login credentials from Google and Instagram that TikTok neglectfully marked as "age unknown."
Making things even worse, the DOJ alleged that TikTok chose to ignore the obvious problem of asking kids to self-report their ages, while earning ad revenue and sometimes sharing kids' data with third parties. And perhaps most concerning for parents who approved kids creating Kids Mode accounts to avoid such invasive targeting and data collection, the DOJ claimed that TikTok collects "several types of persistent identifiers from Kids Mode users without notifying parents or obtaining their consent, including IP address and unique device identifiers."
"Defendants did not need to collect all of the persistent identifiers they have collected from users in Kids Mode to operate the TikTok platform," the DOJ alleged. And "until at least mid-2020, Defendants shared information they collected from children in Kids Mode with third parties for reasons other than support for internal operations. Defendants did not notify parents of that practice."...
Rather than lament over the data siphoning, I call attention to the notion that this kind of legislation implies that anyone other than children is "fair game." You know that anywhere this kind of aggressive data massing could be done outside the scope of this issue... it is being done. And somehow, that concerns me. It's getting so you can't access information unless you "identify yourself" to the data provider... something which sort of make certain that YOU are the product to be sold here... and whatever you want to access is just "bait."
This of course, is all something that had been 'not explicitly regulated' until 1998 when the legislature finally made a call and passed the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA)... From that point forward, any website operation online was lawfully required to conduct their data collection within specific parameters...
Briefly, COPPA created an obligation necessary to operate within our region... and apparently TikTok, by virtue of the primacy of it's corporate existence, resisted fulfilling that obligation (ostensibly until now.) Billions have been poured into lobbying against this obligation, not just by TikTok, but by others as well.
From ArsTechnica: DOJ sues TikTok, alleging “massive-scale invasions of children’s privacy”
...That's concerning because after the kids create the general account, TikTok then gathers even more information—"including usage information, device information, location data, image and audio information, metadata, and data from cookies and similar technologies that track users across different websites and platforms"—while allegedly turning a blind eye to kids dodging age-gates. In some cases prior to 2022, the DOJ alleged, TikTok allowed kids to create non-Kids Mode accounts by using login credentials from Google and Instagram that TikTok neglectfully marked as "age unknown."
Making things even worse, the DOJ alleged that TikTok chose to ignore the obvious problem of asking kids to self-report their ages, while earning ad revenue and sometimes sharing kids' data with third parties. And perhaps most concerning for parents who approved kids creating Kids Mode accounts to avoid such invasive targeting and data collection, the DOJ claimed that TikTok collects "several types of persistent identifiers from Kids Mode users without notifying parents or obtaining their consent, including IP address and unique device identifiers."
"Defendants did not need to collect all of the persistent identifiers they have collected from users in Kids Mode to operate the TikTok platform," the DOJ alleged. And "until at least mid-2020, Defendants shared information they collected from children in Kids Mode with third parties for reasons other than support for internal operations. Defendants did not notify parents of that practice."...
Rather than lament over the data siphoning, I call attention to the notion that this kind of legislation implies that anyone other than children is "fair game." You know that anywhere this kind of aggressive data massing could be done outside the scope of this issue... it is being done. And somehow, that concerns me. It's getting so you can't access information unless you "identify yourself" to the data provider... something which sort of make certain that YOU are the product to be sold here... and whatever you want to access is just "bait."
