US Government Sues TikTok for Alleged Child Privacy Violations
No stranger to conflict with the United States government, the popular social media app TikTok is being sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for alleged child privacy law violations.
Together with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Justice Department (DOJ) claims TikTok committed “widespread violations of children’s privacy laws,” including the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and its associated regulations. The FTC previously fined TikTok in 2019 for collecting data on kids, according to CNN,
The Justice Department says that since 2019, when the FTC fined TikTok and its original parent company, Musical.ly, for COPPA violations, TikTok has continued to violate the law.
Chinese parent company ByteDance has owned TikTok since the company acquired Musical.ly in late 2017. A bill signed into law by President Biden this spring says TikTok must divest from ByteDance by early next year or else it will be banned in the country.
“According to the complaint, from 2019 to the present, TikTok knowingly permitted children to create regular TikTok accounts and to create, view, and share short-form videos and messages with adults and others on the regular TikTok platform,” explains the DOJ. “The defendants collected and retained a wide variety of personal information from these children without notifying or obtaining consent from their parents. Even for accounts that were created in ‘Kids Mode’ (a pared-back version of TikTok intended for children under 13), the defendants unlawfully collected and retained children’s email addresses and other types of personal information.”
The Justice Department also claims that when parents requested that their children’s accounts, including their personal data, be deleted, TikTok regularly failed to honor the requests. Allegedly, TikTok also had insufficient internal policies and processes to identify and delete accounts created by children too young to use the platform.
The federal government claims that due to TikTok’s consistent failure to comply with COPPA, “millions” of children under the age of 13 used the standard version of TikTok, which subjected the kids to “extensive” data collection, interact with adults, and access adult content.
“The Department is deeply concerned that TikTok has continued to collect and retain children’s personal information despite a court order barring such conduct,” says Acting Associate Attorney General Benjamin C. Mizer. “With this action, the Department seeks to ensure that TikTok honors its obligation to protect children’s privacy rights and parents’ efforts to protect their children.”
Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton calls the DOJ’s actions “necessary” and refers to the defendants as “repeat offenders” who operate on a “massive scale.”
“TikTok knowingly and repeatedly violated kids’ privacy, threatening the safety of millions of children across the country,” adds FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC will continue to use the full scope of its authorities to protect children online — especially as firms deploy increasingly sophisticated digital tools to surveil kids and profit from their data.”
Earlier this week, the DOJ accused TikTok of collecting data on American users concerning their views on abortion, gun control, and religion.
“We disagree with these allegations, many of which relate to past events and practices that are factually inaccurate or have been addressed,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes says in a statement posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “We are proud of our efforts to protect children, and we will continue to update and improve the platform. To that end, we offer age-appropriate experiences with stringent safeguards, proactively remove suspected underage users, and have voluntarily launched features such as default screentime limits, Family Pairing, and additional privacy protections for minors.”
The complaint seeks civil penalties and injunctive relief. The complete lawsuit, filed today in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, notes a potential penalty of up to $51,744 for each COPPA violation. Each collection, use, or disclosure of a child’s information, and each day that data collection continued, constitutes a separate violation.
The lawsuit requests a permanent injunction to prevent future COPPA violations, civil penalties for every violation of COPPA, and any additional relief determined “just and proper.”
Image credits: Photos licensed via Depositphotos.
