TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance agreed on Friday to a $400 million settlement to resolve US Justice Department allegations that the short-video app violated children's online privacy.
The DOJ sued TikTok and ByteDance in 2024 for allegedly failing to protect children's privacy and illegally collecting their information. The companies were accused of violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by failing to obtain parental consent before collecting personal information from users under age 13.
Under the settlement terms, TikTok will pay $300 million immediately and an additional $100 million upon entry of an order vacating a prior consent decree entered with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 against TikTok's predecessor, Musical.ly. That earlier case resulted in a $5.7 million fine.
The settlement comes amid broader turbulence for TikTok in the US. In January, ByteDance agreed to establish a majority American-owned joint venture to secure US data and avoid a ban on the app used by more than 200 million Americans. The US Supreme Court also recently upheld the TikTok ban law.
The government noted that since the original complaint was filed, TikTok has undergone significant changes to its ownership, management, compliance functions, and privacy practices. TikTok now requires all users to enter their date of birth and has developed age-moderation systems that identify children under 13, with hundreds of personnel trained in underage moderation deleting tens of thousands of accounts.
