Justice Department sues TikTok for allegedly violating child privacy laws

The legal pressure on TikTok just got more intense.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday sued TikTok and its Chinese parent ByteDance for allegedly breaking child privacy laws, accusing the companies of collecting personal information on children under the age of 13 without their parents’ consent.

The lawsuit comes after TikTok settled a previous legal dispute with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 after the agency accused the social video app of violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. TikTok paid a civil penalty of $5.7 million. Since then, the Department of Justice said, TikTok has been under a court order to remain compliant with the act.

“The Department is deeply concerned that TikTok has continued to collect and retain children’s personal information despite a court order barring such conduct,” said Acting Associate Attorney General Benjamin C. Mizer in a statement. “With this action, the Department seeks to ensure that TikTok honors its obligation to protect children’s privacy rights and parents’ efforts to protect their children.”

TikTok in a statement said that it disputes the allegations, adding that many of the government’s complaints relate to past events or practices that have been addressed.

“We are proud of our efforts to protect children, and we will continue to update and improve the platform,” said TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek in a statement. “To that end, we offer age-appropriate experiences with stringent safeguards, proactively remove suspected underage users, and have voluntarily launched features such as default screentime limits, Family Pairing, and additional privacy protections for minors.”

The popular app, like other tech platforms, has options for children and adults.

Young people can join with a kids’ mode that limits what they can see. TikTok asks new users for their age when creating an account.

But the DOJ alleges in its lawsuit that children have been able to easily circumvent TikTok’s guardrails and establish adult accounts and that TikTok has made it unnecessarily difficult for parents to delete their children’s accounts. The government also says in its lawsuit that TikTok retained the email addresses of children reporting problems to the app longer than necessary and in violation of the law.

“Defendants’ insufficient policies and practices thus allowed children to create a non-Kids Mode TikTok account, gaining access to adult content and features of the general TikTok platform without providing age information,” according to the lawsuit. “Without parental notice or consent, Defendants then collected and maintained vast amounts of personal information from the children who created and used these regular TikTok accounts.”

TikTok remains a major social media force, with more than 170 million users in the U.S., but its future remains uncertain in the nation. U.S. government leaders have raised security concerns over TikTok ‘s ties to China. In April, President Biden signed a law that would effectively ban the service in the U.S. if ByteDance does not sell TikTok’s U.S. operations.

TikTok sued the U.S. government in May, alleging the law violates 1st Amendment rights to free speech.

TikTok’s global headquarters are in Singapore and Culver City. In April, Culver City estimated that TikTok employed roughly 500 people there.

In May, TikTok said it would reduce its workforce due to restructuring, giving layoff notices to 58 employees in Culver City affecting positions including senior business analysts and creative design specialists, according to a WARN notice filed with the state’s Employment Development Department. Those employees had the option of applying to other open positions at TikTok.