TikTok and parent company ByteDance are in the dock again after the Justice Department and FTC filed a civil lawsuit alleging widespread violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
The complaint alleges that, from 2019 to the present day, TikTok knowingly broke the law by allowing children under 13 to create regular TikTok accounts and create, view and share videos and messages with adults and others on the platform.
Further, TikTok retained a large quantity of personal information (PII) from these children without first obtaining consent from their parents, the suit alleged.
It allegedly also unlawfully collected and retained email addresses and other PII for users of accounts created in “Kids Mode” – a special version of TikTok for children under 13. This included information about children’s activities on the app and various “persistent identifiers” which are used to build profiles on children for targeted advertising, the FTC said.
Read more on TikTok privacy issues: TikTok Engaging in Excessive Data Collection
When parents asked TikTok to delete the offending accounts and PII stored in them, TikTok “frequently failed” to honor such requests, the government continued. The suit also alleged that the Chinese company had sub-par internal policies and processes for identifying and deleting accounts created by children under 13.
The FTC claimed that, as of 2020, TikTok’s policy was to maintain accounts of children it knew were under 13 unless the child explicitly admitted their age and/or met other “rigid conditions.” TikTok’s human reviewers allegedly spent just 5-7 seconds reviewing each account to determine if it belonged to a child.
The company also allowed children to bypass an age gate designed to screen children under 13 by allowing them to create accounts using credentials from third-party services like Google and Instagram, it is claimed. Millions of these “age unknown” accounts exist, according to the complaint.
A Long Line of Fines
“TikTok knowingly and repeatedly violated kids’ privacy, threatening the safety of millions of children across the country,” said FTC chair Lina Khan. “The FTC will continue to use the full scope of its authorities to protect children online – especially as firms deploy increasingly sophisticated digital tools to surveil kids and profit from their data.”
The alleged COPPA infringements came even as TikTok/ByteDance was subject to a court order enforcing various COPPA compliance measures following a 2019 judgement.
At the time, TikTok was hit by a record $5.3m COPPA fine for illegally collecting the data of children who used the platform. It has also been fined by regulators in the EU ($368m) and UK ($16m) for breaking data protection laws.
The news is a further blow for the firm, following a bill passed by Congress earlier this year which gave ByteDance one year to sell TikTok or face a total ban on the app in the US.
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