The U.S. sues TikTok for violating children's privacy

The United States sued the platform TikTok on Friday for violating the privacy of minor users by collecting data about them without their parents' permission.

The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission filed a civil lawsuit claiming that the popular video-sharing app violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule.

U.S. authorities said the company incurred a "pervasive violation of laws protecting children's privacy."

The Department summarized in a statement that due to the methodology of the platform owned by the Chinese group ByteDance, millions of children under the age of 13 have been subjected to "extensive data collection" and have also "interacted with adult users and accessed adult content."

It argued that TikTok "knowingly" allowed minors to create accounts and browse content on the platform frequented by 170 million people in the United States.

The Department of Justice alleged that since 2019, the app and its parent company "have collected and stored a wide range of personal information about these minors without informing their parents or obtaining their consent. Even for accounts created in 'Kids Mode.'"

This legal action "is necessary to prevent children under the age of 13 from using the regular TikTok app," said Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton, quoted in the press release.

It is also necessary, he added, to prevent the defendants, "who are repeat offenders and operate on a large scale, from collecting and using private data from young children without parental consent or control."

The U.S. Bureau of Consumer Protection filed a report with the Department of Justice in June because it "had reason to believe" that TikTok and ByteDance "were violating or were in the process of violating the law."

Follow-up

The FTC was investigating to ensure that the platform was abiding by the terms of a friendly settlement reached in 2019, when it accused TikTok's predecessor, Musical.ly, of improperly collecting personal data from minor users.

TikTok agreed to pay $5.7 million in damages and to abide by the provisions of the law called COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule), adopted in 1998.

In a message on the X platform, TikTok said it was "disappointed that the agency has chosen the contentious before continuing to work together to find a reasonable solution."

"We do not agree with these allegations, many of which relate to past practices that are incorrectly presented or have already been addressed," a company spokesman told AFP.

"We are proud of our efforts to protect children," he added, referring to safeguards implemented "voluntarily" by the company, such as removing accounts for users under the age of 13 and viewing time limits.

The U.S. Congress passed a bill in April to force ByteDance to sell its flagship app to a local company within nine months, with the threat of banning it from operating in the United States.

U.S. authorities and lawmakers accuse it of collecting data on U.S. citizens for the Chinese government and believe it poses a national security threat.

"The FTC will continue to use the full scope of its powers to protect children online, especially as companies implement increasingly sophisticated digital tools to monitor children and profit from their data," Lina Khan, chairwoman of that agency, said on Friday.