• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, March 6, 2025

Young TikTok users and their families are pressing a federal judge to allow them to proceed with claims that the app and its parent company, China-based ByteDance, wrongly collected data from pre-teens in order to send them targeted ads.

“TikTok has profited off the systemic invasion of privacy of millions of children in the United States under the age of 13,” counsel for the families argues in papers filed Wednesday with U.S. District Court Judge Otis Wright II in the Central District of California.

TikTok and ByteDance “use this unlawfully collected information to serve children with targeted, behavioral advertising,” counsel adds.

The new papers come in a battle dating to August, when a group of families claimed in a class-action complaint that the social app failed to obtain parental permission before allowing children to create accounts.

The suit was filed one week after the Department of Justice charged TikTok and ByteDance with violating the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which prohibits websites and apps from knowingly collecting personal data of users 12 and under, without parental consent.

The families' complaint repeated many of the Justice Department's allegations, including assertions that TikTok's sign-up process allowed users 12 and under to bypass a “Kids Mode” setting and create non-Kids Mode accounts.

Children's Online Privacy Protection Act only authorizes lawsuits by government officials -- and not class-actions by private parties. But the parents claimed that TikTok's alleged data collection violated other privacy laws or standards in three states, including California. Among other claims, the parents say TikTok engaged in “intrusion upon seclusion” -- a privacy claim that can be brought in California, and that involves “highly offensive” conduct.

In January, TikTok and ByteDance urged Wright to dismiss the complaint, arguing that the allegations in the complaint, even if proven true, aren't detailed enough to prove any of the claims.

“Plaintiffs never say what personal information they provided to defendants, what defendants did with that personal information, or how its collection harmed them,” the companies argued.

The companies elaborated that even though the complaint generally alleges that TikTok collected “personal information,” that term covers a broad array of data, ranging from users' names and addresses to their photographs and geolocation information.

“Plaintiffs do not specify which, if any, of this 'personal information' defendants supposedly collected from them,” the companies argued.

“That omission is critical because many kinds of personal information -- like names, email addresses, phone numbers, and persistent identifiers -- do not implicate legally protected privacy interests,” TikTok and ByteDance added.

But attorneys for the children counter in their new papers that other judges have refused to dismiss privacy lawsuits that involve the collection of commercial data, like names and email addresses, from children.

For instance, counsel argues, a federal judge in California recently refused to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that Google collected data from smartphone users younger than 13 who downloaded children's apps from Android's Play Store.

Wright is expected to hold a hearing in the case on April 28.