U.S. Government Sues TikTok for Illegal Data Collection on Children

[Cicada 5]

In a lawsuit filed Friday, the government accused the platform of breaching a previous legal settlement and “collecting and using young children’s private information without any parental consent or control.”


The new lawsuit is related to a previous legal settlement that the company made with the government in 2019. At that point, TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, agreed to respect the parameters of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA), an old regulation that circumscribes companies’ ability to collect data on children. The agreement was related to a lawsuit against Musical.ly, a platform that was purchased by ByteDance and merged with TikTok. A recent Federal Trade Commission investigation into TikTok determined that the company breached the 2019 agreement, thus spurring the current litigation.

The new lawsuit claims that, instead of complying with this previous order, TikTok “spent years knowingly” allowing millions of children who were under the age of 13 to sign up for the site, and then proceeded to collect a large amount of data on them. The site built “back doors” that allowed kids to “bypass the age gate aimed at screening children under 13,” then made it exceedingly difficult for parents to delete the accounts linked to those children, or the data associated with those accounts, the lawsuit claims.


Even in the “protected” version of the platform, TikTok Kids Mode, children’s data was hoovered up at an alarming rate, the complaint claims. The FTC writes that:

…Even when it directed children to use the TikTok Kids Mode service, a more protected version for kids, the complaint charges that TikTok collected and used their personal information in violation of COPPA. TikTok collected numerous categories of information and far more data than it needed, such as information about children’s activities on the app and multiple types of persistent identifiers, which it used to build profiles on children, while failing to notify parents about the full extent of its data collection and use practices.

Part of the reason that TikTok collected all of this data was to serve those children with targeted advertising, the complaint alleges.

U.S. Government Sues TikTok for Illegal Data Collection on Children

Yet another legal case against the Chinese-owned social media company alleges it has been illegally hoovering up data on children.

gizmodo.com

 

[Gergar12]

Every social media does. But Tik Tok is a Maoist attempt to create chaos in the US. Also, it's annoying they don't allow me to use the word boot licker in the comment so I assume the US will ban it.

 

[Thaluikhain]

But Tik Tok is a Maoist attempt to create chaos in the US.

Not often I hear something described as a Maoist attempt to do things in the US these days.

(Ok, a month or two ago someone was talking about forcing kids out of high school to work for a year on a government farm, but that actually was a Maoist type thing)