In March 2019, TikTok agreed US federal court order prohibiting the social media giant from collecting personal data from its youngest users without their parents’ consent. According to a novel lawsuit filed by US authorities, TikTok immediately violated the order and now faces penalties of $51,744 per violation per day.
TikTok “knowingly allowed children under the age of 13 to create accounts in the standard TikTok environment and collected extensive personal information from those children without prior notice to parents or obtaining verifiable parental consent,” the U.S. Department of Justice alleges on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission in the complaint was filed in federal court in California on Friday.
TikTok spokesman Michael Hughes says the company strongly disputes the allegations. He reiterates the company’s statement in June, when the FTC voted to approve the lawsuit, that many of the issues raised involve “practices that are factually incorrect or have already been discussed.” Hughes adds that TikTok is “proud of our efforts to protect children, and we will continue to update and improve the platform.”
These days, lawsuits alleging violations of children’s privacy have become almost a rite of passage for social media platforms, with companies like Google, MicrosoftAND Epic games paid combined penalties amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars.
But the case against TikTok also comes amid an escalating U.S. government battle with the service, whose ownership by China’s ByteDance has raised national security concerns. Some U.S. officials and lawmakers have said they fear China will employ TikTok to spread propaganda and collect data on vulnerable Americans. TikTok has dismissed those concerns as baseless fearmongering and is fighting a law that requires it to seek novel ownership.
The complaint filed Friday alleges that since 2020, TikTok did not allow users to register themselves if they entered a birth date that indicated they were under 13. However, it allowed those same users to go back, edit their birth date and register without parental consent.
TikTok also failed to remove accounts purportedly belonging to children unless the user explicitly admitted their age on the account, according to the lawsuit. TikTok’s hired content moderators allegedly spent an average of five to seven seconds reviewing accounts for age violations. “Defendants actively avoid removing accounts of users they know to be children,” the lawsuit states. Additionally, millions of accounts flagged as potentially belonging to children were allegedly never removed due to a bug in TikTok’s internal tools.
The lawsuit acknowledges that TikTok has improved some policies and processes over the years but continued to store and employ personal information about children that it should not have had in the first place.
Authorities have also questioned TikTok’s dedicated kids mode. The lawsuit alleges that TikTok collected and shared information about children’s usage and created profiles of them, while misleading parents about the data collection. When parents tried to delete their children’s data, TikTok forced them to jump through unnecessary hoops, the lawsuit further alleges.
TikTok should know better, the government says, because of a 2019 court order that stemmed from TikTok’s predecessor — a service known as Musical.ly — allegedly violating a series of rules designed to protect children’s privacy. Those rules largely come from the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a law dating back to the tardy 1990s, during the dotcom era, that aimed to create a safer environment for children online.
U.S. lawmakers this year considered a major update in the form of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA. The proposed measure, which passed through the Senate earlier this week, would require services like TikTok to better monitor children’s employ of their content. Critics say it would unfairly cut off some juvenile populations, such as transgender children, from crucial support networks. The fate of KOSA remains uncertain. But as the case against TikTok supposedly shows, stricter rules may do little to stop companies from using familiar tactics.