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The US Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Trade Commission on Friday filed a lawsuit against TikTok and its parent company ByteDance for failing to protect children’s privacy on the social media app.

The government said that TikTok violated the law prohibiting collectionuse or disclose personal information of children under 13 years of age without parental consent.

According to the Justice Department, TikTok knowingly allowed children to create accounts and then create short videos and messages and share them with adults and other users of the platform. TikTok collected the personal information of these children without their parents’ consent.

The lawsuit says it aims to end TikTok’s “massive, unlawful invasion of children’s privacy.”

In 2020, Reuters first reported that the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department were investigating allegations that the popular social media app failed to comply with a 2019 settlement aimed at protecting children’s privacy.

The China-owned short-video platform has about 170 million users in the US and is currently fighting a new law that forces ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US assets by January 19 or face a ban.

Last year, the company faced fines from the European Union and the UK for processing data from minors.

Reuters