LOS ANGELES (CN) — The U.S. Justice Department on Friday sued TikTok, claiming that the social media platform is collecting data from children under 13 in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and a 2019 court order.
"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," the government said in a complaint filed in Los Angeles federal court.
The lawsuit is the latest round in the long-running conflict between the U.S. and TikTok, a subsidiary of Beijing-based ByteDance, which is also named as a defendant in the case.
National and state lawmakers have frequently raised data-protection and national-security concerns about the app. They also say that poor content moderation allows the platform’s 170 U.S. million users, including children, to view potentially harmful videos.
In April, President Joe Biden signed a law that will ban TikTok in the U.S. unless ByteDance sells the company within nine months. TikTok has sued to block the law, arguing it's unconstitutional and could eventually lead to the government ordering the publisher of a newspaper or website to sell or be shut down.
Although TikTok offers a version of the app known as "Kids Mode" for children under 13, the Justice Department said in Friday's complaint that platform has knowingly allowed millions of children to create regular accounts without parental consent. Children could simply enter false birthdays or sign up with Instagram or Google to avoid age restrictions altogether, according to the government.
Even when children create an account in Kids Mode, TikTok still collect "persistent identifiers" without parental consent and beyond what is legally allowed for internal operation, the Justice Department said. That data was used to amass profiles and shared with third parties, according to the government.
"We disagree with these allegations, many of which relate to past events and practices that are factually inaccurate or have been addressed," a TikTok spokesperson said in response to the lawsuit.
"We are proud of our efforts to protect children, and we will continue to update and improve the platform," the spokesperson continued. "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."
Even still, the Justice Department also claims that TikTok makes it exceedingly difficult for parents to request their children's data or delete their profiles.
As recently as 2023, according to the complaint, a parent visiting TikTok's website to request deletion of their child’s account and information had to scroll through multiple webpages to find and click on a series of links and menu options. Those options gave no clear indication they applied to such a request, the Justice Department says. Parents then had to also explain in a text box that they are a parent who wanted their child’s account and data to be deleted.
Even then, TikTok wouldn't delete the account if there was no objective indicator the user was younger than 13, the Justice Department said. Instead, it would require parents to fill out additional forms, often with the same information that they had already provided.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department claims, TikTok's internal analyses show that millions of its U.S. users are children under the age of 13.
"For example," the government stated in its complaint, "the number of U.S. TikTok users that defendants classified as age 14 or younger in 2020 was millions higher than the U.S. Census Bureau’s estimate of the total number of 13- and 14-year olds in the United States, suggesting that many of those users were children younger than 13."
TikTok also has other methods to identify and remove children’s accounts from its general platform, but it doesn't use these for that purpose, the Justice Department says. It has its own age-determining technology called “grade level,” which is an algorithm that looks at users' behavior and other metrics for advertising purposes.
Unlike TikTok’s age gate, the government says, this method is based on observable behaviors and not solely on users’ self-reported age — and yet TikTok hasn't used it to identify children on the platform so that their accounts can be removed.
In a message to TikTok's then-head of content partnerships in 2019, TikTok employee acknowledged in 2019 that this grade level method is a better way to identify users under 13.
"We have two age level[s] ... one is age gate and one is grade level,” that person said, according to the complaint.
Age gate is “filled in by users themselves” and “many of them will fill in false information,” while “grade level [is] calculated by algorithm ... through user’s behavior or other metrics, which are more accurate,” that person reportedly said. He went on to explain that, for purposes of a search, “I used grade level, so we will see many users under 13.”
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