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The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have sued TikTok, its Chinese parent ByteDance and their affiliates, alleging “widespread violations” of US child privacy law in the latest legal blow to the short-form video app.
The civil lawsuit filed on Friday alleges violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (Coppa), which prohibits websites from collecting, using or disclosing personal information about children under the age of 13 without their parents’ consent.
The complaint said since 2019, TikTok has “knowingly” allowed children to create accounts and to make, share and view content on the app with adults and others.
“TikTok knowingly and repeatedly violated kids’ privacy, threatening the safety of millions of children across the country,” said Lina Khan, FTC chair, whose probe led to the lawsuit.
Brian Boynton, head of the DoJ’s civil division, added: “This action is necessary to prevent the defendants, who are repeat offenders and operate on a massive scale, from collecting and using young children’s private information without any parental consent or control.”
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move comes as tension grows between TikTok and the US government. Last month Washington disclosed new national security concerns related to its Chinese ownership in response to a lawsuit the company has brought seeking to block a new law that would force a sale or ban of the app in the US.
There has been a bipartisan push in the US for tougher regulation on child safety and privacy among Big Tech companies. On Tuesday, the Senate overwhelmingly passed the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that places a duty of care on platforms to better protect children online, as well as a separate bill, Coppa2.0, which would overhaul Coppa and seek to ban targeted advertising to children and teens, among other privacy protections.
The DoJ complaint said the defendants held on to “a wide variety” of children’s personal information without their parents’ approval — even for accounts set up in “Kids Mode”, a version of TikTok created for users under 13. They also allegedly failed to delete children’s accounts upon their parents’ requests.
TikTok employees sounded the alarm on the app’s conduct, the agencies said. “[T]hat shouldn’t be happening at all or we can get in trouble . . . because of Coppa,” one employee said after numerous underage child accounts were not deleted, the complaint said.
The complaint accused the defendants of infringing an FTC 2019 consent order that stemmed from similar alleged violations by Musical.ly, which ByteDance acquired in 2017 and later helped fuel the explosive growth of TikTok.
Government lawyers are seeking civil penalties and a permanent injunction against future Coppa violations. Under the FTC Act, such penalties may reach $51,744 per violation, each day.
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