A former children’s commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, has launched a “landmark case” against the video-sharing app TikTok, alleging that it illegally collects the personal information of its child users.
According to The Guardian, She alleges the app is breaching UK and EU children’s data protection law and aims to stop it from processing the information of millions of children, make it delete all such existing data, and pay compensation she believes could run into billions of pounds.
Despite a minimum age requirement of 13, the UK’s communications regulator Ofcom found last year that 42 percent of eight to 12-year-olds in the UK used TikTok the report said.
The legal claim alleges that TikTok takes children’s personal information without sufficient warning, transparency or the necessary consent required by law and without parents and children knowing what is being done with their private information.
Lingfield believes more than 3.5 million children in the UK alone could have been affected.
