In March 2019, TikTok agreed a U.S. federal court order TikTok has banned the social media giant from collecting personal information from its youngest users without their parents’ consent. According to a new lawsuit filed by US authorities, TikTok immediately violated that order and now faces fines of $51,744 per violation per day.
TikTok “knowingly allowed children under the age of 13 to create accounts within the regular TikTok experience and collected extensive personal information from those children without first notifying parents or obtaining verifiable parental consent,” the U.S. Department of Justice alleged on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission. In a complaint filed Friday in a federal court in California.
TikTok spokesman Michael Hughes says the company strongly disagrees with the allegations. He reiterates a statement the company issued in June, when the FTC had voted to sue, saying that many of the issues raised relate to “practices that are either factually inaccurate or have already been addressed.” Hughes adds that TikTok is “proud of our efforts to protect children and we will continue to update and improve the platform.”
Lawsuits over alleged violations of children’s privacy are almost a rite of passage for social platforms these days, with companies like Google, Microsoftand Epic Games having collectively paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.
But the case against TikTok also falls within the U.S. government’s escalating battle with the service, whose ownership by China-based ByteDance has raised national security concerns. Some U.S. officials and lawmakers have said they are concerned that China is exploiting TikTok to spread propaganda and collect data on vulnerable Americans. TikTok has refuted the concerns as unfounded fearmongering and is fighting a law that requires it to find a new owner.
The complaint filed Friday alleges that starting in 2020, TikTok did not allow users to register on their own if they entered a birth date showing they were under 13. But it did allow those same users to go back, edit their birth date and register without their parents’ permission.
TikTok also did not remove accounts purported to belong to children unless the user explicitly admitted their age on their account, according to the lawsuit. TikTok-hired content moderators allegedly spent only five to seven seconds on average 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 improved some policies and processes over the years but still retained and used children’s personal information that it shouldn’t have had in the first place.
Authorities also questioned TikTok’s special kids mode. The lawsuit alleges that TikTok collected and shared information about children’s use of the service and created profiles about them while misleading parents about the data collection. When parents tried to have their children’s data deleted, TikTok forced them to jump through unnecessary hoops, according to the lawsuit.
According to the government, TikTok should have known better because of the 2019 court order, which arose from TikTok’s predecessor (a service known as Musical.ly) allegedly violating a number of rules meant to protect children’s privacy. Those rules largely come from the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a law that dates back to the late 1990s, when the dot-coms were looking to create a safer environment for children on the web.
This year, US lawmakers have been weighing a major update in the form of the Children’s Internet Safety Act (KOSA). The proposed measure, which passed the senate Earlier this week, the law would require services like TikTok to better monitor children’s usage. Critics have said it would unfairly exclude some young populations, such as transgender children, from vital support networks. The fate of the KOSA law remains uncertain. But as the case against TikTok purportedly shows, stricter rules may not do much to stop companies from adopting familiar tactics.