TikTok and ByteDance agree to $400 million settlement over children’s privacy violations

TikTok, ByteDance and affiliated entities agreed on Friday to pay $400 million to settle litigation over compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the Justice Department announced. Three hundred million is payable immediately.

The remaining $100 million turns on a court entering an order vacating a prior consent decree against Musical.ly, the app ByteDance acquired in 2017 and folded into TikTok. The figure is considered by the department to be one of the biggest recoveries in a COPPA case.

This settlement is a major victory for American children and parents.

– Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr.

The 2019 children’s privacy order failed to prevent new violations

That decree followed a $5.7 million penalty the FTC obtained in February 2019, then the largest civil penalty in a children’s privacy case. It required the company to obtain parental consent for users under 13 and to remove videos posted by them.

The US DOJ and the FTC filed a lawsuit against ByteDance in the Californian federal court in August 2024, stating that ByteDance knowingly allowed kids younger than 13 to sign up for regular accounts where they were able to post and interact with adults, collecting their personal data without informing their parents and ignoring parental deletion requests.

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