The United States Department of Justice TikTok for violating a children’s privacy law and breaching a 2019 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over previous privacy violations. The lawsuit stems from an earlier investigation into the company by the Federal Trade Commission, which submitted its privacy case to the Justice Department earlier this year.
The FTC had been investigating whether TikTok had violated the terms of a previous privacy agreement with Musical.ly, which was acquired by ByteDance before TikTok launched. According to The investigation found that TikTok had “flagrantly” violated both the 2019 agreement and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
In a statement, the Justice Department also cited TikTok's collection of personal information about children on its platform and its failure to comply with requests to remove the information.
From 2019 through the present, TikTok knowingly allowed children to create regular TikTok accounts and create, view, and share short-form videos and messages with adults and others on TikTok’s regular platform. 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 created in “Kids Mode” (a stripped-down version of TikTok intended for children under 13), the defendants unlawfully collected and retained children’s email addresses and other types of personal information. Furthermore, when parents discovered their children’s accounts and asked the defendants to delete the accounts and the information they contained, the defendants frequently failed to honor those requests. The defendants also had poor and ineffective internal policies and processes for identifying and removing TikTok accounts created by children.
In a statement, TikTok said it disagreed with the allegations and had already addressed some of the conduct described by the Justice Department. “We disagree with these allegations, many of which relate to past facts and practices that are inaccurate or have already been addressed,” 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 safeguards, proactively remove suspicious underage users, and have voluntarily launched features like default screen time limits, family matching, and additional privacy protections for minors.”
The lawsuit comes at a particularly inconvenient time for TikTok, which is facing off against the Justice Department in federal court over a law that aims to force ByteDance to sell the app in the United States.
