The debate surrounding TikTok continues. The U.S. Department of Justice has launched a new legal attack on the social media company, accusing it of illegally collecting data about children. In the lawsuit filed on Friday, the government alleged that the platform violated a previous legal settlement and “collected and used the private information of young children without parental consent or control.”
The new lawsuit is related to a legal settlement the company reached with the government in 2019. Old regulations of competence. The agreement is related to a lawsuit against Musical.ly, the platform acquired by ByteDance and merged with TikTok. The current lawsuit was triggered by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s recent investigation into TikTok, which found the company violated a 2019 agreement.
The new lawsuit alleges that TikTok failed to comply with the previous order and instead “knowingly spent years” allowing millions of children under 13 to sign up to the site and then continued to collect vast amounts of data about them. The lawsuit alleges that the site created a “backdoor” that allowed children to “bypass age thresholds designed to screen out children under 13,” and then made it difficult for parents to delete accounts associated with those children or data associated with those accounts. Claim.
The complaint alleges that even in TikTok Kids Mode, a “protected” version of the platform, children’s data is being stolen at an alarming rate. The Federal Trade Commission wrote:
… Even though it directs children to use TikTok’s Kids Mode service, a more protected version for children, the complaint alleges that TikTok violates COPPA by collecting and using their personal information. TikTok collects numerous categories of information and data far beyond its needs, such as information about children’s activities on the app and multiple types of persistent identifiers it uses to create profiles for children while failing to notify parents its full scope.
The complaint alleges that TikTok collects all this data in part to serve targeted ads to these children.
On Friday, the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission released a joint statement regarding the new lawsuit. “TikTok knowingly and repeatedly violates children’s privacy and threatens the safety of millions of children across the country,” said FTC Chairman Lina M. Khan. “The FTC will continue to use its full authority to protect children online, especially as companies deploy increasingly sophisticated digital tools to spy on children and profit from their data.”
Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton said the lawsuit is “necessary to prevent repeat and large-scale defendants from collecting and using young children’s private information without parental consent or control.”
Gizmodo reached out to TikTok parent company ByteDance for comment.
This is just the latest attack on TikTok, which has been a thorn in the side of the United States for years not only because it is a data collection platform designed for children but also because it is Chinese-owned. U.S. authorities are trying to force ByteDance to sell the platform to a U.S. company, but its owners say that will never happen. ByteDance’s deadline to divest its interests in the platform is January next year. Currently, TikTok maintains a huge influence in American pop culture. TikTok was the most downloaded app in the United States last year, generating more than $16 billion in revenue in the United States alone last year.
