Once again, the Justice Department, acting upon notification and referral from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has filed a lawsuit against the video-sharing platform TikTok and its parent company for alleged flagrant violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The complaint not only charges TikTok and its owner, ByteDance, with failing to notify and obtain consent from parents before collecting, using and retaining personal information from children under age 13 – a basic COPPA requirement – but also maintains that TikTok violated a 2019 consent order it slapped on TikTok and its then-parent, Musical.ly, for similarly breaching COPPA’s mandatory privacy and permission provisions back then. That directive (which the Justice Department claims TikTok began defying soon after it became official) stipulated that TikTok must implement specific compliance measures.