DOJ and FTC Sue TikTok for Ignoring Child Privacy Compliance Order

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are taking action against TikTok for significant failures in complying with a 2019 consent order aimed at improving adherence to children’s privacy laws.

According to a DOJ press release on Friday, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, breached the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). This act restricts the collection, use, and disclosure of personal data from children under 13 without parental consent.

The DOJ's complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on behalf of the FTC, alleges that TikTok allowed children to create and view videos created by adults and to message them, without proper parental oversight. This situation persists despite the 2019 lawsuit and subsequent court order requiring TikTok to bolster its COPPA compliance measures.

Key allegations include TikTok's failure to enforce parental permission protocols for account creation by children. An employee reportedly admitted that TikTok moderators were instructed to disregard any external information indicating that a user under review might be a child. This oversight has allegedly enabled millions of young children to access TikTok, exposing them to adult content and messaging capabilities.

Additionally, the DOJ contends that TikTok continued to collect personal data from children under 13 without obtaining parental consent, retained this information, and did not delete it upon request by parents or users, in violation of the 2019 order. The order had mandated that TikTok implement more robust procedures to prevent children from creating accounts without parental permission and to identify accounts created by children.

However, the DOJ asserts that TikTok has relied on "deficient and ineffectual" internal policies for identifying and deleting such accounts. FTC Chair Lina Khan emphasized the gravity of these violations, stating, "TikTok knowingly and repeatedly violated kids’ privacy, threatening the safety of millions of children across the country. The FTC will continue to use the full scope of its authorities to protect children online–especially as firms deploy increasingly sophisticated digital tools to surveil kids and profit from their data.”

In response, a TikTok spokesperson expressed disagreement with the allegations, suggesting that many pertain to past events and practices that have since been corrected.

"We are proud of our efforts to protect children, and we will continue to update and improve the platform. 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 spokesperson stated in an emailed response.

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