TikTok

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ByteDance may be able to sell TikTok Inc.—both Microsoft and Oracle have been interested. But that offers no protection or solace for the company's workers here, Godwin points out. "If TikTok gets sold to Microsoft or Oracle, that's no guarantee now that [current employees are] going to have a job" or that they want to work for these companies.

"The 1,500 TikTok employees working in the U.S.—as well as their families—need to know whether they will be paid next month," states the lawsuit. "These employees include U.S. citizens that have families to feed, rents and mortgages to pay, and health care to manage. In addition, many TikTok employees working in the United States are here on H1B Visas, which require that their employer sponsor their visa status. These workers, lawfully present in the United States and acting in reliance on their employment relationship with TikTok, as well as in reliance on the U.S. government's H1B visa process, face having to leave the U.S . immediately—or risk deportation—if their employment status is constructively terminated by the effect of the Executive Order."

"We realized the employees had a sort of analytically distinct set of complaints they could make against the government," Godwin says. In this case, employees have a situation where "the company contracted with you to make you an employee, but now the government is reaching in to destroy that contract."

https://reason.com/2020/08/24/mike-...iktok-executive-order/?itm_source=parsely-api

 

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Class-Action Lawsuit Claims TikTok Steals Kids' Data And Sends It To China



A lawsuit filed under the same Illinois law against Facebook over its use of facial recognition technology recently prompted the social network to agree to a record data-privacy settlement of $650 million. Legal experts said, if the court approves the TikTok lawsuit as a national case, the settlement sum could exceed the Facebook payout.

The Illinois law, known as the Biometric Information Privacy Act, "has been striking fear in the heart of many companies in the United States for fear that claims like this will be brought," said Lesley Weaver, one of the 33 plaintiffs' attorneys involved in the litigation against TikTok.

Attorneys for TikTok said the app is neither capturing users' biometric information nor sending any data to China. But TikTok's legal team also argues that the company can transfer data to Beijing, if it so chooses, without breaking any laws.

TikTok said its primary servers for its U.S. users are in Virginia and its backup servers are in Singapore. The company said no data collected on Americans ever goes to servers or authorities in China.

But that contradicts the findings of technology experts hired by the plaintiffs' attorneys. Those experts, who studied the collection and journey of TikTok data, claim troves of information are being sent to servers in China "under the control of third-parties who cooperate with the Chinese government," according to the lawsuit.

"Such information reveals TikTok users' precise physical location, including possibly indoor locations within buildings, and TikTok users' apps that possibly reveal mental or physical health, religious views, political views, and sexual orientation," attorneys for users wrote in legal filings.

The lawyers declined to comment for this story and would not disclose to NPR who their experts are or what methods they employed.

In the lawsuit, they contend that as soon as TikTok is downloaded, it starts collecting data, even before a user opens an account. If a user begins making a video but then does not save it, data in the video is still mined by TikTok, according to the suit. Even when TikTok is merely on a phone but not being used, it is still allegedly vacuuming up loads of personal data. It is a practice, the suit argues, that violates the law by not receiving the consent of users.