The Justice Department sued TikTok on Friday, accusing the company of violating the Children's Online Privacy Act and breaching an agreement it reached with another federal agency.
The complaint, filed with the Federal Trade Commission in a California federal court, comes as the US and the prominent social media company are embroiled in yet another legal battle that will determine whether – or how – TikTok will continue to operate in the country .
The latest lawsuit centers on allegations that TikTok, a trendsetter platform popular with young users, and its China-based parent company ByteDance violated a federal law that requires apps and websites aimed at children to obtain parental consent before collecting personal information of children under 13. It also says the companies failed to honor requests from parents who wanted their children's accounts deleted and chose not to delete accounts even when the companies knew they belonged to children under 13.
“This action is necessary to prevent the defendants, who are repeat offenders and operate on a massive scale, from collecting and using the private information of young children without any parental consent or control.” Brian M. Boyntonhead of the Department of Justice's Political Directorate, said in a statement.
TikTok said it disputed the allegations, “many of which relate to past events and practices that are factually inaccurate or have been addressed.”
“We offer age-appropriate experiences with strict safeguards, proactively remove suspected underage users, and have voluntarily launched features such as default screen time limits, Family Pairing and additional privacy protections for minors,” the company said in a statement.
The US decided to file the lawsuit following an FTC investigation into whether the companies were complying with a previous settlement involving TikTok's predecessor, Musical.ly.
In 2019, the federal government sued Musical.ly, alleging that it violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, by failing to notify parents about its collection and use of personal information about children under 13.
That same year, Musical.ly — which was acquired by ByteDance in 2017 and merged with TikTok — agreed to pay $5.7 million to resolve those allegations. The two companies were also subject to a court order requiring them to comply with COPPA, which the government says did not happen.
In the complaint, the Department of Justice and the FTC allege that TikTok knowingly allowed children to create accounts and retained their personal information without notifying their parents. This practice extends to accounts created in “Kids Mode,” a version of TikTok for children under 13. The feature allows users to watch videos but prevents them from uploading content.
The two companies claim that the information collected included in-app activities and other identifiers used to create user profiles. They also accuse TikTok of sharing the data with other companies — such as Meta's Facebook and an analytics firm called AppsFlyer — to get “Kids Mode” users to be on the platform more, a practice TikTok calls “retargeting less active users”.
The complaint states that TikTok also allowed children to create accounts without having to provide their age or obtain parental approval, using credentials from third-party services. It classified them as accounts of “unknown age,” which the agencies say have grown into the millions.
After parents discovered some of their children's accounts and demanded they be deleted, federal officials said TikTok asked them to go through a complicated process to deactivate them and often did not comply with their requests.
Overall, the government said TikTok used deficient policies that were unable to prevent the proliferation of child accounts on its app and suggested the company was not taking the issue seriously. In at least some periods since 2019, the complaint said TikTok's human moderators spent an average of five to seven seconds reviewing accounts flagged as potentially belonging to a child. He also said that TikTok and ByteDance have technology they can use to identify and remove children's accounts, but they don't use them for that reason.
The alleged violations resulted in millions of children under the age of 13 using the regular TikTok app, allowing them to interact with adults and access adult content, the complaint said.
In March, a person familiar with the matter told the AP that the FTC investigation was also looking into whether TikTok violated a section of federal law that prohibits “unfair and deceptive” business practices by denying that people in China had access to US user data.
Those allegations were not included in the complaint, which asks the court to fine the companies and issue a preliminary injunction to prevent future violations.
Other social media companies have also come under fire for their handling of children's data.
In 2019, Google and YouTube agreed to pay a $170 million fine to settle allegations that the popular video site had illegally collected personal information about children without their parents' consent.
And last fall, dozens of US states sued Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Facebook and Instagram, for harming young people and contributing to a youth mental health crisis by knowingly and intentionally designing addictive features on Instagram and Facebook the children on its platforms. A lawsuit filed by 33 states alleges that Meta routinely collects data on children under 13 without their parents' consent, in violation of COPPA. Nine attorneys general are also filing lawsuits in their respective states, bringing the total number of states taking action to 41 plus Washington, D.C.
This story was originally published by the Associated Press.
