WASHINGTON D.C. (WSAU) – Popular social media app TikTok is once again in the crosshairs of the Department of Justice in a brand new lawsuit alleging the app is guilty of violating children’s privacy law.
According to the New York Post, the lawsuit was filed in partnership with the Federal Trade Commission in a California federal court and alleges that TikTok and their 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 the age of 13.
In a statement to the Post by the Head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, Brian M. Boynton, he views the allegations against TikTok as serious, saying, “This action is 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.”
The Justice Department and the FTC claim in the complaint that TikTok purposefully let minors register accounts and took their personal data without telling the parents. In a press release outlining the case, the DOJ stated that this practice also applies to accounts made in “Kids Mode,” a TikTok version intended for users under the age of 13.
According to the complaint, TikTok gave kids the ability to register accounts using login credentials from outside platforms such as Google and Facebook without requiring them to disclose their age or get permission from their parents. These were categorized as “age unknown” accounts, which authorities state makeup millions of users on TikTok.
The federal government sued Musical.ly, a company previously acquired by TikTok, back in 2019 claiming that Musical.ly had also broken the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, by neglecting to alert parents about the gathering and use of personal information for children under the age of 13, and agreed to pay a $5.7 million fine to resolve the lawsuit.
This lawsuit is being brought as META companies like Facebook and Instagram have been discovered to be hotbeds for sex trafficking offenders. According to a report by the US-based non-profit Human Trafficking Institute, which examined 105 federal child sex trafficking cases in 2020, Facebook was the platform that sex traffickers used the most to groom, recruit, and find children (65%), while the HTI analysis found that Instagram and Snapchat also finished in the top three.
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