The Biden administration fired another shot at TikTok and its Chinese-owned parent ByteDance.
The popular video-sharing app faced a lawsuit from the Department of Justice for failing to protect children’s privacy, according to the complaint filed in California federal court on Friday.
The civil suit, joined by the Federal Trade Commission, comes as TikTok fights a new law that would force ByteDance to divest TikTok’s US assets by January. 19 or face a ban.
In the latest broadside, the feds allege that TikTok violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, also known as COPPA, which prohibits websites from collecting, using or disclosing personal information from children under the age of 13. without their consent.
“This action is necessary to prevent the defendants, who are repeat offenders and operate on a massive scale, from collecting and using the private information of young children without any parental consent or control,” said Brian M. Boynton, head of DOJ’s Civil Division. in a statement.
The complaint said TikTok, which has 170 million US users, has allowed children to create accounts and share content on the app with adults since 2019.
It alleges that TikTok kept “a wide variety” of children’s personal information without their parents’ consent — even those children who signed up for TikTok’s “Kid Mode,” a version of the app for users under 13.
The lawsuit alleges that TikTok even failed to delete some children’s accounts after parental requests.
TikTok employees allegedly admitted that their actions were violating US law.
“[T]Hat shouldn’t happen at all or we could be in trouble…because of Coppa,” an employee said after the accounts of several minors were not deleted, according to the lawsuit.
“We disagree with these allegations, many of which relate to past events and practices that are factually incorrect or have been addressed,” a TikTok spokesperson told The Post in a statement.
“We provide age-appropriate experiences with strict safeguards, proactively remove suspected minor users, and have voluntarily launched features such as default screen time limits, family pairing and additional privacy protections for minors, ” said the spokesman.
The suit follows an investigation by the FTC that sought to find out whether the companies were in compliance with an agreement involving Musical.ly, the predecessor of TikTok that was acquired by ByteDance.
The government sued Musical.ly in 2019 for the same reason it is now suing TikTok — alleged violations of child privacy protection laws.
Musical.ly agreed to pay $5.7 million to settle the allegations, and the app — along with owner ByteDance — agreed to comply with COPPA. But the FTC said it found evidence that the companies are still not in compliance with US protections.
US government agencies are seeking civil penalties and an injunction. These fines can reach more than $50,000 per day under the FTC Act.
The lawsuit comes just days after the Senate passed landmark child online safety legislation, sending two bills — COPPA 2.0 and the Children’s Online Safety Act — to an uncertain future in the House.
The senators pushed the bills forward at a time when the US has hit Chinese-owned TikTok with legal challenges.
Policymakers fear the app gives the Chinese government the ability to access US data and monitor users. ByteDance, based in Singapore, has denied that the government has any control over the app.
In April, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill forcing ByteDance to sell the app or face a US ban. TikTok has called the bill “unconstitutional” and vowed to fight it in court.
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