The video-sharing app TikTok is being accused by the DOJ of violating children’s online privacy law and running afoul of a settlement it had reached with another federal agency.
The latest lawsuit focuses on allegations that TikTok, a trend-setting platform popular among young users, and its China-based parent company ByteDance violated a federal law that requires kid-oriented apps and websites to get parental consent before collecting personal information of children under 13.
The U.S. decided to file the lawsuit following an investigation by the FTC that looked into whether the companies were complying with a previous settlement involving TikTok's predecessor, Musical.ly. The two agencies allege the information collected included activities on the app and other identifiers used to build user profiles. They also accuse TikTok of sharing the data with other companies – such as Meta's Facebook and an analytics company called AppsFlyer – to persuade"Kids Mode" users to be on the platform more, a practice TikTok called"re-targeting less active users.
Overall, the government said TikTok employed deficient policies that were unable to prevent children's accounts from proliferating on its app and suggested the company was not taking the issue seriously. In at least some periods since 2019, the complaint said TikTok's human moderators spent an average of five to seven seconds reviewing accounts flagged as potentially belonging to a child.
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