A bipartisan group of senators is calling on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate TikTok after accusations were made that the app has violated promises to protect children’s privacy.
The senators, two Democrats and two Republicans, wrote to the FTC asking for an investigation Friday following reports from the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood and the Center for Digital Democracy, two groups focused on protecting individual’s privacy on the internet, that TikTok let videos of children under 13 remain on the app and did not directly provide parents links to its privacy policy on its homepage or notify parents of its data practices before gathering their children’s information. Those failures, the groups said, put TikTok in violation of a 2019 agreement with the FTC and the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
Democrats Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, along with Republicans Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, asked the FTC to look into the accusations and hold the company accountable if necessary.
“Faced with compelling evidence that this wildly popular social media platform is blatantly flouting binding U.S. privacy rules, the FTC should move swiftly to launch an investigation and forcefully hold violators accountable,” they wrote.
Josh Golin, the executive director of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, said that TikTok hasn’t followed children’s privacy law for years, “thereby ensnaring perhaps millions of underage children in its marketing apparatus and putting children at risk of sexual predation.”
TikTok “takes the issue of safety seriously for all our users, and we continue to further strengthen our safeguards and introduce new measures to protect young people on the app,” said a TikTok spokesperson.
