U.S. Department of Justice The lawsuit alleges that TikTok violated the Children’s Privacy Act and a 2019 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission regarding past privacy violations. The lawsuit stems from an earlier investigation into the company by the Federal Trade Commission, which filed a privacy lawsuit with the Department of Justice earlier this year.
The FTC was investigating whether TikTok violated the terms of a previous privacy settlement with Musical.ly, which was acquired by ByteDance before TikTok’s launch. The investigation found that TikTok had “materially” violated both the 2019 settlement and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
In a statement, the Justice Department also noted that TikTok collected personal information of children on its platform and failed to comply with requests to remove that information.
From 2019 through the present, TikTok knowingly allowed children to create regular TikTok accounts and create, view, and share short videos and messages with adults and other users on the regular TikTok platform. Defendants collected and retained a variety of personal information from these children without notifying or obtaining parental consent. For accounts created in “Kids Mode” (a simplified version of TikTok for children under 13), Defendants unlawfully collected and retained children’s email addresses and other personal information. In addition, when parents discovered their children’s accounts and asked Defendants to delete the accounts and the information therein, Defendants frequently did not comply with their requests. Defendants also had inadequate and ineffective internal policies and processes to identify and delete TikTok accounts created by children.
TikTok disputed the allegations and said in a statement that it had previously addressed some of the conduct the Department of Justice described. “We disagree with these allegations, many of which relate to past events or practices that are either untrue or have already been addressed,” the company said. “We are proud of our efforts to protect children and will continue to update and improve our platform. To that end, we have implemented rigorous safeguards to provide an age-appropriate experience, proactively remove users we suspect are underage, and voluntarily launched features like default screen time limits, family pairing, and additional privacy protections for minors.”
The lawsuit comes at a particularly inopportune time for TikTok, which is set to face off against the Justice Department in federal court over legislation aimed at forcing ByteDance to sell its app in the United States or register with Facebook.
