TikTok has agreed to pay $400 million to settle a federal lawsuit over the privacy of children using the platform.

The nine-figure deal announced by the Justice Department is one of the largest recoveries ever obtained in a case involving the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, better known as COPPA.

And the allegations behind that number are even more disturbing than the number itself.

A $400 Million Deal

The Justice Department announced Friday that TikTok, ByteDance, and affiliated companies will pay $300 million immediately.

The remaining $100 million is due after a court vacates an earlier consent decree involving Musical.ly, the app ByteDance acquired and later folded into TikTok.

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Federal officials said TikTok has made substantial changes to its ownership, management, compliance operations, age controls, and parental-oversight tools since the lawsuit was filed in 2024. The government also stressed that the settled claims were allegations and that there was no determination of liability.

The case was brought in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California after a referral from the Federal Trade Commission. Justice Department attorneys said the settlement gives families stronger safeguards without the delay and uncertainty of continuing the litigation.

The Justice Department laid out the size of the agreement in its announcement:

Attorney General Todd Blanche followed with a blunt warning for online platforms: protecting children is not optional, and the government will pursue companies that fail to meet their legal obligations.

What The Government Alleged

The case did not begin with a minor paperwork dispute.

According to the Federal Trade Commission’s 2024 account of the lawsuit, TikTok and ByteDance knowingly allowed millions of children under 13 to use regular TikTok accounts while allegedly collecting their personal information without parental notice or consent.

The complaint alleged that company reviewers spent an average of just five to seven seconds deciding whether an account belonged to a child. It also accused TikTok of maintaining accounts it knew belonged to underage users unless those children explicitly admitted their age under rigid review rules.

Federal officials further alleged that TikTok used data from underage accounts for targeted advertising, built paths that allowed children to bypass age gates, and classified millions of third-party sign-ins as “age unknown.”

In TikTok’s Kids Mode, the government said the platform collected more information than it needed and shared some data with Facebook and AppsFlyer to bring less-active users back to the app. The complaint also alleged that more than 300,000 problem reports from Kids Mode users included children’s email addresses that TikTok kept longer than necessary.

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Parents allegedly faced another wall.

The FTC said TikTok made account-deletion requests unnecessarily difficult and sometimes failed to remove children’s data even after parents completed the company’s process.

Coverage of the settlement quickly spread Saturday:

This Was Not TikTok’s First Warning

Back in 2019, Musical.ly agreed to pay $5.7 million to settle another children’s-privacy case.

The Federal Trade Commission said at the time that the app collected names, email addresses, phone numbers, profile photographs, and other information from children under 13 without first obtaining parental consent.

Accounts were public by default. Children’s profile information and videos could be visible to strangers, direct messages were enabled, and an older feature allowed users to find others within a 50-mile radius.

That 2019 settlement required the company to comply with COPPA and remove videos made by children under 13. The 2024 lawsuit accused TikTok of violating both the law and that existing order.

Musical.ly had been downloaded more than 200 million times worldwide, with 65 million accounts registered in the United States. The FTC said the company knew a significant share of its users were under 13 and had received thousands of complaints from parents about children who created accounts.

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The jump from $5.7 million to $400 million tells the story.

For years, Big Tech companies have treated children’s data as just another stream of information to collect, sort, profile, and monetize. Parents were expected to navigate layers of settings and forms while platforms operated at a scale few families could ever hope to monitor.

This settlement sends the opposite message: when a company builds a product used by millions of children, protecting those children is the company’s responsibility.

Not the parents’ burden to discover after the damage is done.

And certainly not a cost of doing business that can be brushed aside with a token fine.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

 

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