TikTok's practices endangered children's safety, US alleges in lawsuit

New York, Aug 3 (IANS) The US government has sued Chinese-owned social media giant TikTok, alleging that it endangered the safety of children by illegally collecting information from them and allowing them to share messages and videos with adults.

The US Justice Department announced on Friday that it had filed the lawsuit in a California federal court alleging violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and failure to implement earlier court orders to comply with the law.

"TikTok knowingly and repeatedly violated kids' privacy, threatening the safety of millions of children across the country," said Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, which joined the Justice Department in suing the short video behemoth.

The complaint against TikTok and its parent company ByteDance alleges that from 2019 onwards TikTok allowed children to create regular TikTok accounts and create, view, and share short-form videos and messages with adults.

TikTok also collected personal information from even accounts in the Kids Mode, a limited version for children under 13, the complaint said.

The personal information included children's email addresses.

When parents discovered their children's accounts and asked TikTok to delete the accounts and information, the company frequently did not honour those requests, the complaint added.

Moreover, TikTok had "deficient and ineffectual internal policies and processes for identifying and deleting TikTok accounts created by children," the Justice Department said.

The government sued TikTok's predecessor, Musical.ly, in 2019 for COPPA violations, and the court ordered it to undertake specific measures to comply with the law, which they have not, according to the department.

"The Department is deeply concerned that TikTok has continued to collect and retain children's personal information despite a court order barring such conduct," Acting Associate Attorney General Benjamin Mizer said.

COPPA was passed in 1999 and came into effect in 2000.

The lawsuit comes as a new, even more stringent law, the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, was approved by the Senate on Tuesday and is pending before the House of Representatives.

This would extend some of the protections in COPPA to teenagers under 17 and also add more protection for children and teens.

TikTok, which was banned in India in 2020, has faced calls in the US for a similar ban from legislators and privacy advocates.

Because it is a Chinese company under the jurisdiction of Beijing there are fears that the humongous trove of information it collects about Americans could be seized by the Chinese government and misused.

In addition, TikTok has been accused of exploiting children by addicting them to its short videos.

TikTok claimed that it had segregated US data and kept them in the US, but The Wall Street Journal reported in January that sometimes data is shared with the China-based parent company.

Responding to the filing of the lawsuit, TikTok's Spokesperson Michael Hughes said the allegations pertained to past events and practices and were inaccurate.

He asserted, "We are proud of our efforts to protect children and we will continue to update and improve the platform."

(Arul Louis can be contacted at arul.l@ians.in and followed at @arulouis)

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