TikTok will pay $400 million to settle Justice Department lawsuit over child privacy – Engadget
The DoJ said the app has made significant strides in privacy protections since the 2024 suit.
TikTok and ByteDance have reached an agreement with the Department of Justice to settle a lawsuit that claimed the app broke children’s privacy laws. The settlement is one of the “largest recoveries ever obtained” for a case related to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the DoJ said in a statement.
The settlement dates back to a 2024 lawsuit brought by then-President Joe Biden’s Justice Department. The DoJ alleged that the company had violated the terms of an earlier FTC settlement related to its acquisition of Musical.ly. It further accused the app of violating COPPA by allowing children under 13 to create TikTok accounts and wrongfully collecting data about children who used it in “Kids Mode.” The company also “frequently failed” to comply with requests from parents to delete their children’s data, the DoJ said at the time.
In announcing the settlement, the Justice Department noted that the app has since “undergone significant changes to its ownership, management, compliance functions, and privacy practices.” TikTok finalized a deal earlier this year that created a new entity for its US business. Known as TikTok USDS Joint Venture, the new company is controlled by a group of investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX. ByteDance retained a 19.9 percent stake in the company.
“The company has implemented extensive measures designed to strengthen safeguards for younger users, improve age-related controls, and enhance parental oversight,” the DoJ said in a statement. “Those developments have materially advanced the public interests underlying the Department’s litigation and have strengthened protections for millions of American families.”
Under the terms of the settlement, “TikTok will pay $300 million immediately,” and pay another $100 million after its prior agreement with FTC is vacated, the DoJ said. TikTok and ByteDance didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The settlement is the latest hurdle the company has cleared after years of intense scrutiny over its privacy practices and ties to China. Earlier this month, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) officially cleared the way for federal workers to once again use the app after a 2022 law banned it from most government-issued devices.