TikTok Should Face FTC Moves Over Children’s Privacy, Groups Say

TikTok is collecting children’s information without parental permission, in violation of a U.S. privacy law and an earlier Federal Trade Commission settlement, 20 privacy groups are alleging in a complaint to the agency.

The FTC should ban the Bytedance Ltd. unit from creating new U.S. accounts, the groups told the commission Thursday.

“The FTC ordered TikTok to delete all personal information of children under 13 years old from its servers, but TikTok has clearly failed to do so,” Michael Rosenbloom, staff attorney at the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown Law, which represents the privacy groups, said in a statement.

The complaint comes more than a year after TikTok, then known as Musical.ly, settled with the FTC for alleged violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The company paid $5.7 million and entered into a consent decree to end the action.

“We take privacy seriously and are committed to helping ensure that TikTok continues to be a safe and entertaining community for our users,” a TikTok spokesperson said in an email.

The groups, led by the Center for Digital Democracy and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, allege the privacy law and consent decree violations continue.

The groups allege that they recently found accounts featuring children, many with tens of thousands to millions of followers, that have existed since before the order.

TikTok is already facing scrutiny from other nation’s regulators over children’s privacy. Colombia and the Netherlands are conducting probes.

Consumers have also brought lawsuits against TikTok in California and Illinois over their alleged children’s data use.

In addition to the TikTok settlement, the FTC reached a $170 million deal to end claims against Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube in 2019 over allegedly violating the children’s privacy law. The YouTube pact is the largest FTC settlement under that law, surpassing the TikTok deal.