U.S. Government Sues TikTok for Illegal Data Collection on Children

The tussle over TikTok continues. The U.S. Justice Department has launched a new legal attack on the social media company, accusing it of illegally harvesting data on children. In a lawsuit filed Friday, the government accused the platform of breaching a previous legal settlement and “collecting and using young children’s private information without any parental consent or control.”

The new lawsuit is related to a previous legal settlement that the company made with the government in 2019. At that point, TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, agreed to respect the parameters of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA), an old regulation that circumscribes companies’ ability to collect data on children. The agreement was related to a lawsuit against Musical.ly, a platform that was purchased by ByteDance and merged with TikTok. A recent Federal Trade Commission investigation into TikTok determined that the company breached the 2019 agreement, thus spurring the current litigation.

The new lawsuit claims that, instead of complying with this previous order, TikTok “spent years knowingly” allowing millions of children who were under the age of 13 to sign up for the site, and then proceeded to collect a large amount of data on them. The site built “back doors” that allowed kids to “bypass the age gate aimed at screening children under 13,” then made it exceedingly difficult for parents to delete the accounts linked to those children, or the data associated with those accounts, the lawsuit claims.

Even in the “protected” version of the platform, TikTok Kids Mode, children’s data was hoovered up at an alarming rate, the complaint claims. The FTC writes that:

…Even when it directed children to use the TikTok Kids Mode service, a more protected version for kids, the complaint charges that TikTok collected and used their personal information in violation of COPPA. TikTok collected numerous categories of information and far more data than it needed, such as information about children’s activities on the app and multiple types of persistent identifiers, which it used to build profiles on children, while failing to notify parents about the full extent of its data collection and use practices.

Part of the reason that TikTok collected all of this data was to serve those children with targeted advertising, the complaint alleges.

On Friday, the Justice Department and the FTC released joint statements regarding the new litigation. “TikTok knowingly and repeatedly violated kids’ privacy, threatening the safety of millions of children across the country,” said FTC Chair Lina M. 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.”

Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton said that the lawsuit was “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.”

Gizmodo reached out to TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, for comment.

This is only the latest attack on TikTok, which has been a thorn in America’s side for years, not just because it’s a data-hoovering platform designed for children, but because it is Chinese-owned. U.S. authorities have tried to force ByteDance to sell the platform to a U.S. company, something its owners say will never happen. The deadline for ByteDance to divest its interest in the platform is in January of next year. For now, TikTok maintains a huge presence in American popular culture. TikTok was the most downloaded app in the U.S. last year and posted revenue of more than $16 billion in the U.S. alone last year.