The battle over TikTok continues, as the U.S. Department of Justice launches a new legal attack against the social media company, accusing it of illegally collecting data about children. In a lawsuit filed on Friday, the government accused the platform of violating previous legal settlements and “collecting and using personal information of young children without parental consent or control.”
The new lawsuit is related to a previous legal settlement the company made with the government in 2019. At that time, TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, agreed to respect the parameters of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA), an outdated regulation that limits companies’ collection of children’s data. The agreement was related to lawsuits against Musical.ly, a platform that ByteDance acquired and merged with TikTok. A recent Federal Trade Commission investigation into TikTok determined that the company violated the 2019 agreement, which spurred the current lawsuit.
The new lawsuit alleges that instead of complying with the previous orders, TikTok “knowingly over years” allowed millions of children under the age of 13 to sign up to the site and then collected reams of data about them. The site built “backdoors” that allowed kids to “circumvent the age gate intended to screen children under 13,” and then made it extremely difficult for parents to delete accounts linked to those children or the data associated with those accounts, the lawsuit alleges.
The complaint alleges that even TikTok Kids Mode, a “protected” version of the platform, collected children’s data at alarming rates.
…The complaint alleges that TikTok collected and used children’s personal information in violation of COPPA, despite directing children to use the more protective, child-friendly version of its TikTok Kids Mode service. TikTok collected various categories of information and more data than necessary, including information about children’s activities on the app and multiple types of persistent identifiers that it used to create profiles of children, but failed to inform parents of the full extent of its data collection and use practices.
One of the reasons TikTok collected all this data was to serve targeted advertising to these kids, according to the lawsuit.
On Friday, the Department of Justice and the FTC issued a joint statement about the new lawsuit. “TikTok has knowingly and repeatedly violated children’s privacy and threatened the safety of millions of children across the country,” FTC Chairman Lina M. Khan said. “The FTC will continue to use the full powers of its powers to protect kids online, especially as companies deploy increasingly sophisticated digital tools to monitor kids and profit from their data.”
Chief Deputy Attorney General Brian Boynton said the action was “necessary to prevent defendants who are repeat offenders of significant crimes from collecting and using personal information about young children without parental consent or supervision.”
Gizmodo has reached out to TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, for comment.
This is just the latest attack against TikTok, which has been a thorn in America’s side for years, not only because it’s a data-collection platform designed for children, but also because it’s owned by a Chinese company. U.S. authorities have tried to force ByteDance to sell the platform to a U.S. company, but the owner says that will never happen. The deadline for ByteDance to sell its stake in the platform is next January. For now, TikTok maintains a major presence in American pop culture. It was the most downloaded app in the U.S. last year, and generated more than $16 billion in revenue in the U.S. alone last year.
