DOJ sues TikTok for allegedly violating children’s privacy laws

The legal pressure on TikTok has become even greater.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday sued TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance for allegedly violating children’s privacy laws, accusing the companies of collecting personal information from children under 13 without their parents’ consent.

The lawsuit was filed after TikTok settled a previous legal dispute with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019, after the agency accused the social media app of violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. TikTok paid a $5.7 million civil penalty. Since then, TikTok has been under a court order to comply with the act, the Justice Department said.

“The Department is deeply concerned that TikTok continues to collect and maintain personal information from children despite a court order prohibiting such conduct,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Benjamin C. Mizer said in a statement. “With this action, the Department seeks to ensure that TikTok is living up to its responsibility to protect children’s privacy rights and parents’ efforts to protect their children.”

TikTok said in a statement that it disagrees with the allegations, adding that many of the government’s complaints concern past events or practices that have already been addressed.

“We pride ourselves on our efforts to protect children and will continue to update and improve the platform,” TikTok spokesman Alex Haurek said in a statement. “To that end, we offer age-appropriate experiences with rigorous safeguards, proactively remove suspicious underage users, and have voluntarily launched features like default screen time limits, Family Pairing, and additional privacy protections for minors.”

The popular app, like other tech platforms, offers options for both children and adults.

Younger people can join Kids Mode, which limits what they can see. TikTok asks new users their age when they set up an account.

But the Justice Department alleges in its lawsuit that children were easily able to bypass TikTok’s security measures and create adult accounts, and that TikTok made it unnecessarily difficult for parents to delete their children’s accounts. The government also alleges in its lawsuit that TikTok kept the email addresses of children reporting technical issues with the app longer than necessary, violating the law.

“Defendants’ inadequate policies and practices allowed children to create non-Kids Mode TikTok accounts, accessing adult content and general TikTok platform features without disclosing their age,” according to the lawsuit. “Without providing parental notice or consent, Defendants collected and stored massive amounts of personal information from children who created and used these regular TikTok accounts.”

TikTok remains a major social media force, with more than 170 million users in the U.S., but its future remains uncertain at home. U.S. government leaders have raised security concerns about TikTok’s ties to China. In April, President Biden signed legislation that would effectively ban the service in the U.S. if ByteDance doesn’t sell TikTok’s U.S. operations.

In May, TikTok sued the U.S. government, arguing that the law violates the right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.