The Justice Department sued TikTok last Friday, accusing the company of violating children’s online privacy law and violating a settlement it had reached with another federal agency.
The complaint, filed together with the Federal Trade Commission in a California federal court, comes as the U.S. and the social media company are embroiled in another legal battle that will determine whether — or how — TikTok will continue to operate in the country.
The lawsuit focuses on allegations that TikTok and its China-based parent company ByteDance violated a federal law that requires kid-oriented apps and websites to get parental consent before collecting personal information of children under 13. It also says the companies failed to honor requests from parents who wanted their children’s accounts deleted and chose not to delete accounts even when the firms knew they belonged to kids under 13.
“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,” Brian M. Boynton, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, said in a statement.
TikTok disagreed with the allegations, stating, “We offer age-appropriate experiences with stringent safeguards, proactively remove suspected underage users and have voluntarily launched features such as default screentime limits, Family Pairing, and privacy protections for minors.”
The U.S. decided to file the lawsuit following an investigation by the FTC that looked into whether the companies were complying with a previous settlement involving TikTok’s predecessor, Musical.ly. In 2019, the federal government sued Musical.ly, alleging it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, by failing to notify parents about its collection and use of personal information for kids under 13.
That same year, Musical.ly — acquired by ByteDance in 2017 and merged with TikTok — agreed to pay $5.7 million to resolve those allegations. The two companies were also subject to a court order requiring them to comply with COPPA, which the government says hasn’t happened.
In the complaint, the Justice Department and the FTC allege TikTok has knowingly allowed children to create accounts and retained their personal information without notifying their parents. This practice extends to accounts created in “Kids Mode,” a version of TikTok for children under 13. The feature allows users to view videos but bars them from uploading content.
The agencies allege the information collected included app activities and other identifiers used to build user profiles. They also accuse TikTok of sharing the data with other companies—such as Meta’s Facebook and an analytics company called AppsFlyer—to persuade “Kids Mode” users to stay on the platform more, a practice TikTok called “re-targeting less active users.”
The complaint says TikTok allowed children to create accounts without providing their age or obtaining parental approval using third-party services’ credentials. It classified these as “age unknown” accounts, which the agencies say have grown into millions.
After parents discovered some of their children’s accounts and asked for them to be deleted, federal officials said TikTok asked them to go through a convoluted process to deactivate them and frequently did not honor their requests.
Overall, the government said TikTok employed deficient policies that were unable to prevent children’s accounts from proliferating on its app and suggested the company wasn’t taking the issue seriously. In at least some periods since 2019, the complaint said TikTok’s human moderators spent an average of five to seven seconds reviewing accounts flagged as potentially belonging to a child. It also said TikTok and ByteDance have technology they can use to identify and remove children’s accounts, but don’t use them for that reason.
The alleged violations have resulted in millions of children under 13 using the TikTok app, allowing them to interact with adults and access adult content, the complaint said.
In March, a person familiar with the matter told the AP that the FTC’s investigation was also looking into whether TikTok violated a portion of federal law that prohibits “unfair and deceptive” business practices by denying that individuals in China had access to U.S. user data.
In 2019, Google and YouTube agreed to pay a $170 million fine to settle allegations that the popular video site illegally collected children’s personal information without parental consent. Last fall, dozens of U.S. states sued Meta Platforms Inc. for harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to its platforms.
