TikTok agreed to pay $400M to settle a 2024 Justice Department lawsuit over federal children’s privacy law. The company will pay $300M now and the other $100M after a court vacates the consent decree that still binds Musical.ly, TikTok’s predecessor company. The suit alleged that TikTok and ByteDance collected personal data from children under 13 without parental consent, ignored parents who asked to have their kids’ accounts deleted, and left up accounts the companies knew belonged to under-13 users. Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. called the outcome “a major victory for American children and parents.” Meta is defending itself at a federal trial in Oakland over allegations it broke the same 1998 statute, COPPA, along with several state laws.
