TikTok has agreed to pay $400 million to settle a Department of Justice lawsuit alleging the platform collected vast amounts of data on millions of children under 13 without parental consent, marking one of the largest child privacy settlements in US history.
The DOJ announced the deal on Friday. The case stemmed from a 2024 lawsuit filed under former President Joe Biden, which accused TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, of violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law enacted in 2000 that requires parental consent before collecting personal information from users under 13. The DOJ described the settlement as one of the largest recoveries ever obtained in a COPPA case. The case alleged that TikTok collected data from children without notifying parents or obtaining consent and did not delete accounts when parents requested removal.
Under the terms of the agreement, TikTok and ByteDance will pay $300 million immediately. The remaining $100 million is due upon entry of an order vacating a prior consent decree entered against TikTok’s predecessor, Musical.ly, the DOJ said in a press release. That 2019 consent decree followed a $5.7 million fine against Musical.ly for earlier COPPA violations, under which the company committed to seeking parental consent for any user under 13 and taking steps to prevent young children from creating accounts.
A pattern of failures
TikTok continued to struggle. The 2024 lawsuit alleged that the company allowed large numbers of children to remain on the platform for years, maintaining and using their personal information, including data that could be used for targeted advertising, even after employees raised concerns about the presence of young users. The case also alleged that TikTok changed aspects of its registration policies in ways that made it more difficult to determine whether users were old enough to join the service.
When the lawsuit was filed, US attorneys said there were more than 170 million teenagers using TikTok and that the app was directed to children. The platform did not effectively gauge the age of users or obtain parental consent from those who were underage, according to the government’s complaint.
Changes and scrutiny
The DOJ noted significant changes. Those changes include shifts in ownership, management, compliance functions, and privacy practices, as well as the implementation of measures designed to strengthen safeguards for younger users, improve age-related controls, and enhance parental oversight of children’s activity and personal information. The settlement does not require TikTok or ByteDance to admit wrongdoing. The justice department did not detail any action against TikTok beyond the financial penalty.
The agreement comes amid broader scrutiny of TikTok’s approach to user safety. Days before the settlement, Bloomberg reported that TikTok had intentionally disabled an algorithmic safeguard for roughly 10% of US users as part of an experiment, a safeguard designed to reduce the possibility that users would be overwhelmed by harmful or potentially damaging content. The report drew criticism from lawmakers. Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut sent a letter to TikTok CEO Shou Chew and Adam Presser, the chief executive of the company’s US business, questioning the decision.
The settlement follows a year of major structural change for TikTok’s US operations. In 2024, Biden pushed for TikTok to be either banned or required to divest its US operations, and President Donald Trump went on to support divestment, which occurred last year. US operations are now 81% owned by a consortium of investors, while ByteDance maintains a 19% stake. The deal to put TikTok under a new joint ownership structure in the US finally happened in January. ByteDance, a privately held company, was most recently valued by investors at $550 billion.
Other companies have faced penalties under the same law. Google’s YouTube paid $170 million in 2019, and Epic Games paid $275 million in 2022 for COPPA violations. Meta now faces penalties that could exceed hundreds of billions of dollars from COPPA violations alleged by attorneys general of 29 US states, with a jury trial in that lawsuit having started this week. The Instagram and Facebook owner is accused of targeting child users and profiting off of them.
Axios first reported the news. A representative of TikTok did not respond to requests for comment from the BBC. Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said that children and parents are better protected today than they were when the case began.