The US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Friday announced a $400 million settlement with Tiktok over children’s privacy concerns, effectively ending a dispute that has been going on for over two years Allegations of obtaining personal information from children under the age of thirteen without parental consent.
TikTok pays $300 million immediately; The remaining $100 million will be due once the court issues an order overturning a 2019 Consent Decree against Musical.ly, the predecessor of TikTok.
The First actionThe lawsuit, filed in the Central District of California in August 2024, alleged that Tiktok and its parent company ByteDance knowingly allowed children under the age of 13 to create and use TikTok accounts without their parents’ knowledge or consent. The lawsuit also alleges that the defendants collected extensive data from these children and that they failed to comply with parents’ requests to delete the children’s accounts and any personal information collected. The DOJ alleged that TikTok and ByteDance violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (“COPPA”) And Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (“Rule” or “COPPA Rule”)),
“This settlement is a major victory for American children and parents,” Assistant Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. said in the DOJ statement. Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division also spoke for the government, saying: “Companies that collect personal data from children must comply with the law.”
The 2019 order is from previous COPPA violations against Musical.ly. Former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Joe Simon said at the time of the initial settlement that Musical.ly (TikTok at the time) “knew” that children were using its app and “failed to obtain parental consent” before collecting things like names, email addresses and other personal information from said children ages 12 and younger. The $5.7 million penalty was, at the time, the largest civil penalty ever imposed by the FTC in a child privacy case.
This agreement follows a period of turmoil for TikTok. In accordance with a Executive Order of September 2025 (EO) by US President Donald Trump, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC was founded in January to hand control of the social media site into US hands. As part of the deal, ByteDance sold a majority stake in TikTok to Oracle, Silver Lake and Emirati investment firm MGX. Representative for TikTok and ByteDance didn’t respond immediately to requests for comments. At the beginning of this legal dispute, Tiktok stated that most of the allegations “Refer to past events and practices that are factually inaccurate or have been corrected.” They also did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
A groundbreaking federal lawsuit is currently underway alleging that Meta violated online privacy laws by knowingly collecting personal information from millions of children under 13 without parental consent.
