TikTok has agreed to pay $400 million to the United States to settle a lawsuit alleging the platform violated children's privacy.
Under the agreement, TikTok and its parent company ByteDance will immediately pay the Justice Department $300 million. They will pay an additional $100 million when the US government lifts a 2019 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission.
Lawyers for the US government said the app was directed at children and was used by more than 170 million teenagers. They said TikTok did not effectively check the ages of its users or obtain parental consent for minors to use the app.
The BBC noted that the agreement is one of the largest settlements ever reached over the issue.
Massive data collection
The settlement stems from a lawsuit filed in 2024 by the Justice Department under former President Joe Biden. The suit claimed that TikTok and ByteDance collected massive amounts of data on millions of users under 13.
The practices violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law enacted in the US in 2000.
While the lawsuit predated last year's separation of TikTok's US operations from its original headquarters in China, the settlement only covers the company's activities in China. ByteDance was recently valued by investors at $550 billion.
Tech giants face fines
Other technology companies have previously paid government fines for violating the children's privacy law. Google's YouTube paid $170 million in 2019, and Epic Games paid $275 million in 2022.
Dozens of US states have also filed lawsuits against Meta under the same legislation. The owner of Instagram and Facebook is accused of targeting and profiting from child users.
A jury trial in that case began this week, stemming from allegations brought by attorneys general from 29 states. Meta faces potential fines that could exceed hundreds of billions of dollars.
