Oops, they did it again. With every new issue of MyIDMatters, it seems as though there is another announcement of bad privacy news for TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance. Not only is TikTok currently fending off a federal ban, but now the video-sharing platform has been charged by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). According to the FTC chair: “TikTok knowingly and repeatedly violated kids’ privacy, threatening the safety of millions of children across the country.”
In the FTC complaint, TikTok is alleged to have failed to comply with COPPA requirement to obtain parental consent before collecting personal information from children under the age of 13. But it gets worse: the FTC also levied a consent order against TikTok in 2019 for the same violation. Instead of altering the way they notify parents and collect underage data, TikTok spent years in flagrant violation of COPPA. Moreover, even when directing children to use TikTok Kids Mode service (which purports to be a more protected version of the app), TikTok continued to collect and use their personal information.
To add to the seriousness of these allegations, the Department of Justice has joined the FTC’s complaint. This comes one month after the DOJ’s defense of a new federal law that forces ByteDance to either divest from its stake in TikTok or face a ban in the U.S. The DOJ argues that TikTok poses a significant national security risk; speaking on the new allegations against TikTok, the Acting Associate Attorney General said, “The Department is deeply concerned that TikTok has continued to collect and retain children’s personal information despite a court order barring such conduct.” With 170 million active users in the United States, this complaint represents another massive misstep for TikTok. Instead of complying with the FTC’s initial complaint and doing their due diligence with underaged users, they allowed backdoor routes to bypass the age gate aimed at screening those under 13. The protection of our most vulnerable users and their personal information needs to be enforced—and TikTok failed to live up to that most basic standard. No matter how they try to defend this latest allegation, one thing is for sure: they are not that innocent.
