Personal data vs social media
As social media grows increasingly popular with new platforms, such as Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, emerging, the distribution of personal data has become more abundant and widespread than ever before. One would think that advances in social media platforms would bring about better cyber security. However, according to history, that hasn’t exactly been the case.
Data breaches are common in the digital world; in fact, surviving the digital era without ever having a data breach would be uncommon. From TikTok to Facebook to LinkedIn, here’s a short recap of data breach lawsuits that have come to light this year.
1. TikTok sued in the Netherlands
The Market Information Research Foundation (SOMI), which is the voice for more than 64,000 parents from both the Netherlands and the European Union, sent a subpoena to an Amsterdam court recently. The parents are seeking €1.4 billion ($1.7 billion) in damages on the accusation that social media platform TikTok is using and collecting data without proper permission.
The concern shared by most plaintiffs is the lack of clarity TikTok shows in terms of data privacy and permission, and the lack of control in the distribution of content with negative influence. Parents fear that the content on TikTok may harm children psychologically.
You don’t need parental permission to open an account on TikTok, and this comes as another point of concern; they argue that TikTok has neglected children’s safety by making the platform easily accessible to younger audience.
2. Facebook data leak
According to researcher Alon Gal, 533 million people had their personal data leaked online. The data includes Facebook ID, full name, location, birthdate, email address and phone number. This isn’t the first data breach Facebook faced this year. In fact, the leaked dataset was actually already circulating online since January of this year.
At first, access to the leaked dataset required certain credits or a form of payment to a Telegram bot, but now the data can be accessed for free.
Facebook explained that the data that was leaked is old. In 2019, Facebook also suffered a data leak due to systemic flaws, and claims that they resolved the issue in the same year.
On behalf of affected citizens, some organisations are set to take mass action against the social media giant. One of them includes Digital Rights Ireland, which is gearing up to bring this case to trial in an Irish court. The organisation will file a lawsuit on claims that Facebook has failed to protect user data and failed to notify users of the breach after it occurred. Individual users involved in the case could receive compensation of up to $14,600.
3. LinkedIn
In April, LinkedIn became a victim of data breach where personal data of over 500 million accounts started circulating online. The database, alongside an archive of 327 million scraped accounts, was put up for sale with a value for $7,000 in bitcoin.
However after further investigation, LinkedIn claimed that the dataset is actually a combination of data from various websites and companies. The company further claimed that no private member account’s data was included, which means that the leaked data only contains details that were already visible on the individual’s public page.
LinkedIn said that this doesn’t qualify for being a data breach and instead merely a data scrape. However, until today, LinkedIn still has not notified users whose data appeared on the dataset.