WASHINGTON – The company behind the popular Path social networking service agreed to pay $800,000 to settle federal charges that it illegally collected personal information from cellphones without the knowledge or consent of its customers, the government said Friday.

Path Inc. of San Francisco collected names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and usernames for Facebook and Twitter accounts from its customers’ cellphones without permission, the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission said.

These customers included roughly 3,000 children under 13 and occurred even in cases when a Path customer sought to block the service from collecting the information. The government said Path collected the information the first time a customer signed into the service and upon every subsequent sign-in.

“The user had no meaningful choice as to the collection and storage of personal information from the user’s mobile device contacts, and the user interface options were illusory,” according to the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Path. The Justice Department filed the case against Path on Thursday in federal court in San Francisco at the FTC’s request.