US Sues TikTok over child privacy violations

The Justice Department sued TikTok on Friday, accusing it of illegally collecting children’s data and escalating a long-running battle between the U.S. government and the Chinese-owned app.

TikTok broke the law by gathering personal information from users under 13 without their parents’ permission, according to the government’s complaint. The company knowingly allowed children under 13 to create and use TikTok accounts, the government said, and frequently failed to honor parents’ requests to delete their children’s accounts.

The lawsuit, which was filed in a federal court in Southern California, said those practices violated both the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a law that restricts the online tracking of children, and a 2019 agreement between TikTok and the government in which the company pledged to notify parents before collecting children’s data and remove videos from users under 13 years old.

The suit, which also names TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, asks for the court to fine the companies over the violations.

The government said in the complaint that it was suing to “put an end to TikTok’s unlawful massive-scale invasions of children’s privacy.”

“We disagree with these allegations, many of which relate to past events and practices that are factually inaccurate or have been addressed,” Alex Haurek, a spokesperson for TikTok, said in a statement. “We are proud of our efforts to protect children, and we will continue to update and improve the platform.”

The lawsuit is the latest confrontation between the U.S. government and TikTok, which claims more than 170 million users in the United States. This year, President Joe Biden signed a law that would force a sale or a ban of the app by the end of January because of national security concerns, and TikTok has sued to stop the government’s plan.

Separately, lawmakers and regulators have accused the app of creating an online ecosystem that leaves children at risk. In January, senators grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew alongside other tech executives over online safety concerns. TikTok is the second-most popular social media site among teens after YouTube, with 58% saying they visit it daily, according to the Pew Research Center.

TikTok says it has committed thousands of employees and billions of dollars to making its platform safe to use. In January, Chew told lawmakers that people under 16 on TikTok did not have access to direct messaging and that their accounts were automatically set to private. He also said that only TikTok users who were 18 or older were able to host livestreams.

“I firmly believe that our industry’s most fundamental responsibility is to provide a safe and secure online space for our community,” he told the lawmakers.

Regulators and lawmakers have taken an increasingly tough stance on children’s privacy in recent months. On Tuesday, senators passed the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that would require social media platforms including TikTok to do more to protect minors. The Senate also voted in favor of a second proposal to strengthen online privacy rules for children. It is not clear whether House will take up the package of legislation.

TikTok has also faced scrutiny globally over child protection. The European Union fined TikTok 345 million euros in September for failing to protect the privacy of young users. In April 2023, a British regulator fined the app after it found that more than 1 million children under the age of 13 had signed up for its service.

The lawsuit filed Friday is the result of a lengthy Federal Trade Commission investigation into TikTok’s practices with minors. The complaint said that millions of TikTok’s U.S. users were under 13, citing an internal analysis from the social media company.

Some of the new allegations in the lawsuit stem from a TikTok offering called Kids Mode, a setting for those under 13 that the company says limits data collection and offers curated videos to children.

In the complaint, the Justice Department said that even when TikTok users were logged in with that setting, the app collected their email addresses and other personal information. The government said that TikTok compiled information about children using the app based on data like their IP addresses and information unique to their devices, then shared some of that data with Facebook and a marketing firm to help lure young users back to TikTok after their use had declined.

The children’s privacy law says that the collection of such data can be used only to support an online service’s internal operations.

The company also failed in checking to make sure that underage users weren’t on the platform, the government said. TikTok representatives reviewing accounts only spent an average of five to seven seconds evaluating whether each profile belonged to a child, and the content moderation team that oversaw the identification and deletion of under-13 accounts numbered, at least for a period, fewer than 24 people, according to the filing.

TikTok’s own employees had raised concerns about its practices with underage child accounts and challenges in deleting the profiles, it added.

The government also said that TikTok broke an agreement it reached with the FTC over privacy violations in 2019. At the time, the agency accused lip-syncing and dancing app Musical.ly — which was acquired and combined with TikTok — of breaking the law by collecting personal information about children under 13.

TikTok settled with the FTC over the allegations that year by paying a record $5.7 million fine and agreeing to remove videos made by children under the age of 13. It also agreed that the FTC could run follow-up investigations to make sure it was complying with the terms of the settlement.

The FTC said in a statement in June that it had investigated TikTok for potential violations of its earlier legal settlement as well as additional violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. It referred the case to the Justice Department — leading to the lawsuit filed Friday.

If TikTok lost in court or settled with the government, it could be forced to pay a major fine, said David Vladeck, a former top consumer protection official for the FTC.

“This will be a billion-dollar civil penalty,” he said.

Vladeck said it was notable that TikTok had not done more to address the concerns laid out in the lawsuit, especially given it was under immense pressure from the government already.

“That’s sort of astonishing — or hubris,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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