According to reports, TikTok is again under investigation by federal authorities on children’s privacy.
Angela Lang / CNET
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice are investigating allegations that TikTok has failed to honor its commitment to protecting children’s privacy under a 2019 agreement, Reuters reported Tuesday. Two sources informed the news agency that they had participated in separate conference calls with the agencies regarding the allegations.
TikTok is a hugely popular social media app where people, mostly teenagers and young adults, post videos up to 15 seconds long that are often synced with music. The app became increasingly popular in the first quarter of the year and recorded more than 2 billion downloads from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, the analysis company Sensor Tower reported in April.
In May, the Center for Digital Democracy, the Campaign for Ad-Free Childhood, and more than a dozen other organizations asked the FTC to investigate allegations that the app’s operators violated the law protecting children’s online privacy, by not deleting personal information about users under the age of 13 as agreed.
In 2019, the operators of the app agreed to pay $ 5.7 million Settle FTC fees that it violated COPPA by not obtaining parental consent before collecting personal information about children under the age of 13. According to the FTC, TikTok did not delete this personal information when it received complaints from parents and their children.
A TikTok spokeswoman said the company takes “security seriously for all of our users” and continues to “introduce new measures to protect young people in the app.”
The app has been under the microscope in recent months. U.S. lawmakers have accused it of being a threat to national security, and the U.S. Army and Navy have banned the app from government devices.
In an interview with Fox News on Monday evening, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Trump administration knew TikTok and was considering banning the app.
“We’ll definitely look into it,” Pompeo replied to an interviewer. “We have been working on this issue for a long time,” he added, referring to the government’s bans against the highly competitive Chinese telecommunications equipment supplier Huawei.
The FTC declined to comment. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.