In March 2019 TikTok has agreed to a US federal court order barring the social media giant from collecting personal information from its youngest users without their parents’ consent. According to a new lawsuit filed by US authorities, TikTok promptly violated that order and now faces fines of $51,744 per violation per day.
TikTok “knowingly allowed children under the age of 13 to create accounts in the normal TikTok experience and collected extensive personal information from those children without first providing parental notice or obtaining verifiable parental consent,” the US Department of Justice alleged in the Federal Trade Commission’s name in a complaint filed Friday in federal court in California.
TikTok spokesman Michael Hughes says the company strongly disagrees with the allegations. It reiterated a statement the company issued in June, when the FTC voted to sue, that many of the issues raised involved “practices that were factually inaccurate or were addressed.” Hughes added that TikTok is “proud of our efforts to protect children, and we will continue to update and improve the platform.”
Lawsuits over alleged violations of children’s privacy are almost rite of passage for social platforms these days, with companies like Google, Microsoft and Epic Games collectively paying hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.
But the case against TikTok also falls into the US government’s escalating battle with the service, whose ownership by China-based ByteDance has raised national security concerns. Some US officials and lawmakers have said they are concerned that China is using TikTok to spread propaganda and collect data on vulnerable Americans. TikTok has dismissed the concerns as unfounded fear mongering and is fighting a law that would require it to seek new ownership.
The complaint, filed Friday, alleges that as of 2020 TikTok does not allow users to self-register if they enter a date of birth that indicates they are under 13. But it allowed those same users to go back, edit their date of birth and sign up without parental permission.
TikTok also would not remove accounts allegedly belonging to children unless the user made an explicit acknowledgment of their age on their account, according to the lawsuit. TikTok’s hired content moderators are said to have spent an average of just five to seven seconds reviewing accounts for age violations. “Defendants actively avoid deleting the accounts of users they know to be children,” the lawsuit states. Additionally, millions of accounts flagged as potentially belonging to children were allegedly never removed due to an error in TikTok’s internal tools.
