TikTok Sued by United States Justice Department for Violating Child Privacy Laws

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The United States Department of Justice today sued TikTok and its parent company ByteDance for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). COPPA makes it illegal for websites to collect, use, and disclose data from children under the age of 13 without parental consent.

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The lawsuit [PDF] alleges that from 2019 on, TikTok has knowingly allowed children to create TikTok accounts and to create, view, and share videos and messages with adults and others on the TikTok platform. TikTok is accused of collecting and retaining personal information from children without consent from their parents. Data was collected even from accounts created in Kids Mode.

Millions of children under 13 have used the regular TikTok app, which the DoJ says has subjected them to "extensive data collection" and allowed them to "interact with adult users and access adult content." TikTok is also accused of making it difficult for parents to get their child's account and data deleted.

The Department of Justice is seeking civil penalties for every COPPA violation and injunctive relief that would prevent TikTok from continuing to collect data from children.

TikTok is already embroiled in a lawsuit with the U.S. government over a bill that requires the social network to be sold off to a non-Chinese company or face a ban in the United States. TikTok parent company ByteDance has until January 19, 2025 to find a buyer for TikTok, but a sale is unlikely because the Chinese government would need to approve the divestiture, and it has said that it would "firmly oppose" any effort to sell TikTok.

Note: Due to the political or social nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Political News forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Tag: TikTok

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Top Rated Comments

justperry Avatar
justperry
9 months ago
All these social media apps are actually very anti social, ban all of them, especially for teenagers.
Score: 62 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Vulkan Avatar
Vulkan
9 months ago
I feel all social media should be 18+ only... No one under the age of 18 should have an account any of those sites. Social Media should be treated like *******.
Score: 48 Votes (Like | Disagree)
DTphonehome Avatar
DTphonehome
9 months ago
I really wish they would just ban this app already.
Score: 38 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Mr_Ed Avatar
Mr_Ed
9 months ago

All these social media apps are actually very anti social, ban all of them, especially for teenagers.
Yeah, I find it difficult to identify any redeeming value for any of them. I control how much time my son spends on his devices, what gets installed on his devices, web site access on his devices. Tiktok (and a few others) will not even DNS resolve in my home network. That may sound draconian to some, but being a teenager is already hard enough without all the other BS pressures introduced by social media.
Score: 27 Votes (Like | Disagree)
iMac The Knife Avatar
iMac The Knife
9 months ago
Like others have mentioned, I think all social media should be 18+, if not 21+. I've lived without it, then with it when it came along, and for the past four years I've lived without it again. I can tell you that I was and am a lot happier without it. To each their own though.
Score: 26 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Apple Knowledge Navigator Avatar
Apple Knowledge Navigator
9 months ago
On the one hand, I see many people young and old using these platforms for good, but I believe if there’s an issue it’s that younger people in particular don’t understand what’s good for them in the long term.

To be clear, if someone had told me in the early-Nineties when I was young that I could own a device with all the capabilities that we know of today, I would have snatched at it like anyone else. A Game Boy was about the most advanced potable ‘toy’ one could own, but you’d be lucky to get 2 hours from the batteries, the games soon became repetitive, and there was no wider way to network on it. These inherent limitations meant the device was good purely for short bursts of fun.

But today, children are given monumenrally more advanced devices by adults with little or no regard for their welfare other than “We don’t want them to feel left out” in the company of their friends. So they’re shifting accountability and the child becomes responsible for how they manage their own behaviour on the device, despite not having emotional maturity or deep knowledge of how the broader world operates. Google search may as well be Pandora’s box.

What I see today with social media - and this is the saddening thing - is children using it to document lives that aren’t real. It’s this detachment from reality is worrying, because many of the ways that young people grow to become healthy adults is by taking an interest in the world right around them rather than the one that is fabricated on their phone. Social media in its worst form represents a ‘me me me’ culture where balanced discussions and criticism cannot take place, where egos are constructed, and where the darker side of peoples characters negatively impacts others.
Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)
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