The News
The US government sued Chinese-owned app TikTok on Friday, alleging that it illegally collected children’s data, violating their privacy.
The lawsuit accused TikTok and its parent company ByteDance of gathering and retaining personal information about the app’s under 13 users without their parents’ consent , and frequently failed to honor parents’ requests to delete their children’s TikTok accounts.
“TikTok knowingly and repeatedly violated kids’ privacy, threatening the safety of millions of children across the country,” the head of the Federal Trade Commission Lina Khan said in a statement.
The lawsuit is the latest blow to TikTok in a long-running feud between the US government and the app, over national security concerns of its Chinese ownership.