OAN Staff Blake Wolf
2:57 PM – Friday, August 2, 2024
TikTok and parent company ByteDance brace themselves as the Department of Justice (DOJ) officially filed its lawsuit, alleging that the social media platform illegally collected data from its underage users.
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TikTok is accused of allowing children under the age of 13 to create accounts on the popular social app. Additionally, the lawsuit accuses TikTok of discreetly collecting data from minors’ accounts and not complying with parents’ requests to delete their own children’s profiles.
“For years, defendants have knowingly allowed children under 13 to create and use TikTok accounts without their parents’ knowledge or consent, have collected extensive data from those children, and have failed to comply with parents’ requests to delete their children’s accounts and personal information,” stated the 31-page civil lawsuit.
The lawsuit follows a Federal Trade Commission investigation, which maintained that TikTok violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, as well as a 2019 agreement that the FTC made with TikTok regarding its policies towards children.
FTC Chair Lina Khan weighed in on the ongoing legal battle.
“TikTok knowingly and repeatedly violated kids’ privacy, threatening the safety of millions of children across the country,” she stated.
Even though TikTok does offer a “Kids Mode” system for users under 13-years-old, it does not obtain consent from parents and it is also “easily bypassed,” the lawsuit continued.
“Kids Mode is designed for Children residing in the United States. It allows Children to engage with TikTok’s fun video features while limiting the information collected from them. Children can view videos from other creators and explore their creativity by capturing their own videos with music and special effects. While Children may save these videos directly to their device, the videos will not be saved by us or viewable by other users. Children also have a more limited interactive experience, including, for example, they cannot exchange messages with other users, and other users cannot view their profiles,” TikTok stated.
“As a result, for years millions of American children under 13 have been using TikTok and defendants have been collecting and retaining children’s personal information,” the legal documents noted.
In addition, The lawsuit claims TikTok moderators only spend an average of 5-to-7 seconds per review when assessing accounts that may belong to children.
A TikTok spokesperson chimed in and responded to the allegations, stating that the platform simply offers “age-appropriate experiences with stringent safeguards.”
“We disagree with these allegations, many of which relate to past events and practices that are factually inaccurate or have been addressed,” TikTok announced in a statement.
However, the legal battle between ByteDance and the Justice Department is nothing new, as Congress has previously passed legislation that would ban TikTok from U.S. networks and app stores if the platform is not sold to a U.S. company.
The ban could take effect as soon as January of 2025.
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