TikTok is officially facing an FTC and DOJ lawsuit over alleged children’s privacy violations. Photo Credit: Ian Hutchinson
When it rains, it pours – at least for TikTok and its ByteDance parent, which are facing a Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission lawsuit over alleged children’s privacy law violations.
That complaint was filed against the app, its owner, and various subsidiaries today, just months out from the possible ban of TikTok in the U.S. As many know, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act has given ByteDance until January 19th (with a possible 90-day extension) to divest from TikTok in the States.
But TikTok and ByteDance are pushing back against the law, which they maintain is unconstitutional, logistically unworkable, and, in turn, equivalent to an outright ban. There is, of course, a lot riding on TikTok’s effort to block the forced-sale requirement, and the DOJ earlier this week took aim at the app’s sought injunction.
Now, TikTok and ByteDance are grappling with another complaint courtesy of the federal government, which says the parties violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
Over the years, multiple platforms have been accused of violating the law, which, as its name suggests, consists of data-collection protections for under-13 users on websites, services, and applications. 2019 saw the FTC tout a $5.7 million settlement with TikTok (then Musical.ly) over separate alleged COPPA infractions.
However, the app has been compelled to cough up far larger sums than that for alleged children’s privacy shortcomings in different nations. April of 2023 delivered a roughly $16 million fine for TikTok in the UK, for instance, before September of 2023 brought an order for the app to pay approximately $370 million in the European Union.
More recently, February of this year saw the EU kick off a Digital Services Act probe into, among other things, TikTok’s impact on minors. And with related criticism and scrutiny having hardly abated in the interim, the DOJ and the FTC are looking to end “TikTok’s unlawful massive-scale invasions of children’s privacy,” according to their 31-page lawsuit.
Bearing in mind TikTok’s decidedly young userbase, said alleged invasions of privacy refer to “knowingly creating accounts for children and collecting data from those children without first notifying their parents” and “failing to honor parents’ requests to delete their children’s accounts and information,” per the legal text.
Additionally, TikTok and its co-defendants have allegedly come up short in their obligation to “delete the accounts and information of users they know are children.”
The DOJ and the FTC also say the defendants have enabled “children to evade or bypass TikTok’s age gate,” and data from the app’s distinct “Kids Mode” has allegedly been shared, in violation of COPPA, “with third parties for reasons other than support for internal operations.”
Furthermore, in terms of the latest allegations against TikTok, the actual process through which parents could request the deletion of their children’s data was allegedly “unreasonable” during the period in question, per the partially redacted complaint. Meanwhile, TikTok has failed “to delete accounts and information that even their own employees and systems identify as belonging to children,” the government agencies elaborated of the aforementioned claim.
All told, the FTC and the DOJ are seeking civil penalties from and a permanent injunction against TikTok. Now in the habit of providing updates on legal matters via its dedicated “TikTok Policy” social media account, the namesake app this afternoon refuted the allegations, “many of which relate to past events and practices that are factually inaccurate or have been addressed.”
