US Department of Justice TikTok for violating the child privacy law and breaching a 2019 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission for previous privacy violations. The lawsuit stems from an earlier Federal Trade Commission investigation into the company its privacy issue was referred to the DoJ earlier this year.
The FTC was investigating whether TikTok violated the terms of an earlier non-disclosure agreement with Musical.ly, which was acquired by ByteDance before TikTok was launched. according to the investigation found that TikTok “clearly” violated both the 2019 agreement and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
In the statement, the Department of Justice also cited TikTok’s collection of personal information about children on its platform and its failure to comply with data deletion requests.
Since 2019, TikTok has deliberately allowed children to create regular TikTok accounts and create, view, and share short-form videos and messages with adults and others on the regular TikTok platform. The defendants collected and stored large amounts of personal information from these children without notifying their parents or obtaining their consent. Even for accounts created in “Kids Mode” (a reverse version of TikTok designed for children under 13), the defendants illegally collected and stored children’s email addresses and other types of personal information. In addition, when parents discovered their children’s accounts and asked the defendants to delete the accounts and the information they contained, the defendants often did not comply. The defendants also had deficient and ineffective internal policies and processes for identifying and removing TikTok accounts created by children.
In a statement, TikTok said the Justice Department had a problem with the allegations, which it said had previously addressed some of the behavior it described. “We disagree with these claims, many of which are factually inaccurate or relate to past events and practices that have been resolved,” the company said. “We are proud of our efforts to protect children and will continue to update and improve the platform. To that end, we offer age-appropriate experiences with strict security measures, proactively remove suspected minor users, and voluntarily enable features like default screen time limits, Family Pairing, and additional privacy protections for minors.”
The lawsuit comes at a particularly inconvenient time for TikTok, which is set to face off against the Justice Department in federal court. Over the law, which aims to force ByteDance to sell the app or face in the United States.
