A group of Iranian teen girls are being sought by police for posting a TiKTok video of themselves dancing to a Selena Gomez song.
The video, being widely shared online, shows five teen girls dancing without headscarves in front of tower blocks in western Tehran to the song "Calm Down" by Selena Gomez and Nigerian singer Rema.
The song was released last Wednesday, March 8, which was International Women’s Day.
Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari said the video would be considered ordinary in most cities around the world but in Iran, "it’s an act of defiance."
"I wonder if @heisrema knows that his song #CalmDown is the backgrop of an incredibly courageous act of defiance by young Iranian women?" tweeted Nahayat Tizhoosh, a Canadian journalist. "It started when 5 girls danced to his music in @shahrak_ekbatan- risking persecution by a regime that has murdered women for simply protesting." READ MORE...
The backlash against China-owned TikTok in the U.S. and other Western countries escalated in recent days, as some U.S lawmakers pushed to give President Joe Biden the authority to impose a ban on the app for all users.
Canada banned TikTok on government-issued mobile devices on Monday, following a similar ban from the European Union last week.
TikTok, which has more than 100 million monthly active users in the U.S., has faced growing scrutiny from government officials over fears that user data could fall into the possession of the Chinese government and the app could ultimately be weaponized by China to spread misinformation.
However, the fight to ban TikTok risks imposing undue limits on free speech and private business, mimicking the type of censorship for which some Western countries have faulted China, according to some experts and civil liberties advocates. READ MORE...
WASHINGTON, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Kentucky is joining more than 20 U.S. states in banning the popular video app TikTok on government devices citing cybersecurity concerns.
The state said it had updated its employee handbook to bar state employees from using government-managed devices to access the Chinese-owned app "other than for a law enforcement purpose." On Thursday, the governors of Wisconsin and North Carolina signed orders banning TikTok on government devices. Ohio, New Jersey and Arkansas also took similar actions earlier this week.
Some states have gone farther than targeting TikTok. New Jersey and Wisconsin for example also banned vendors, products and services from other Chinese companies including Huawei Technologies, Hikvision (002415.SZ), Tencent Holdings (0700.HK) - the owner of WeChat, ZTE Corp (000063.SZ) as well as Russian-based Kaspersky Lab. READ MORE...
TikTok is the latest tech giant to be schooled by France’s data protection watchdog for breaking rules on cookie consent.
The €5 million penalty announced today by the CNIL relates to a cookie consent flow TikTok had used on its website (tiktok.com) until early last year — in which the regulator found it was not as easy for users to refuse cookies as to accept them — so it was essentially manipulating consent by making it easier for site visitors to accept its tracking than to opt out.
This was the case when the watchdog checked in on TikTok’s process, in June 2021, until the implementation of a “Refuse all” button on the site in February 2022 — which appears to have resolved the matter. (And may explain the relatively small fine levied in this case, along with the number of users and minors affected — as well as the enforcement relating only to its website, not its mobile app.)
Tracking cookies are typically used to serve behavioral advertising but can also be used for other site activity, such as analytics.
“During the check carried out in June 2021, the CNIL noted that while the companies TikTok United Kingdom and TikTok Ireland did offer a button allowing cookies to be accepted immediately, they did not put in place an equivalent solution (button or other) to allow the Internet user to refuse their deposit just as easily. Several clicks were necessary to refuse all cookies, against only one to accept them,” the watchdog notes in a press release [translated from French with machine translation].
“The Restricted Committee considered that making the refusal mechanism more complex actually amounts to discouraging users from refusing cookies and encouraging them to favor the ease of the “Accept all” button,” it added, saying it found TikTok had therefore breached a legal requirement for freedom of consent — a violation of Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act “since it was not as simple to refuse cookies as to accept them”.
In addition, the CNIL found that TikTok had not informed users “in a sufficiently precise manner” of the purposes of the cookies — both on the information banner presented at the first level of the cookie consent and within the framework of the “choice interface” that was accessible after clicking on a link presented in the banner. Hence finding several breaches of Article 82.
