TIKTOK IN HOT WATER

The social media app TikTok was hit by two lawsuits in the last week, a new challenge for the company which is already under the intense scrutiny of federal regulators and lawmakers.

The lawsuits are drawing new public attention on the company’s practices and are highlighting critics’ two chief concerns: TikTok’s ties with the Chinese government and how it handles the data of minors.

TikTok, which has seen its popularity soar, has already been downloaded over 110 million times in the U.S. But the company, which was bought and repackaged by a Chinese firm ByteDance, is at a critical stretch as it reportedly faces a federal review over national security concerns and with lawmakers floating legislation to crack down on its data practices.

One of the lawsuits, was quickly settled a day after it was filed, but the company still faces a class-action suit in California.

In that lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Northern District Court of California, Misty Hong, a student, is accusing the company of transferring private user data to China, despite the company publicly denying those claims.

Hong’s lawsuit also alleges that the short-form video app secretly collected information about users, including their locations, ages, private messages, phone numbers, contacts, genders, browsing histories, cell-phone serial numbers and IP addresses.

Hong’s lawsuit was filed on behalf of all American TikTok users.

The company did not respond to requests for comment on the allegations in the lawsuit, but TikTok has said that all user data is stored in Virginia, with a backup server in Singapore.

“None of our data is subject to Chinese law,” the company wrote in an October blog post.