TikTok Agrees to $400 Million Settlement Over Children’s Privacy Violations

TikTok has agreed to pay $400 million to the US government to settle a lawsuit alleging that the platform violated children’s privacy laws, marking one of the largest settlements of its kind. The case stems from a 2024 lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden, which alleged that TikTok and its parent company ByteDance collected vast amounts of data from millions of users under the age of 13 in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said the settlement means children and parents are now better protected than when the case began. Other major companies have also faced penalties for alleged COPPA violations, including Google’s YouTube, which paid $170 million in 2019, and Epic Games, which paid $275 million in 2022. Meta is separately facing a major lawsuit brought by attorneys general from 29 US states over alleged violations involving children on Facebook and Instagram.

The TikTok case predates last year’s separation of the company’s US business and operations from its original China-based structure, but the settlement applies only to TikTok’s operations in China. ByteDance remains privately held and was most recently valued by investors at about $550 billion, underscoring the enormous scale of the company involved in the settlement.