TikTok and its parent company byte beat have settled $400 million with the United States Department of Justice to close a federal lawsuit surrounding online privacy of children. The focus of the case is that the platform is referred to as allowing a large number of children under 13 years of age to use the service for long periods and to collect personal information without parental consent.
Proceedings point to COPPA irregularities
The case was initiated by the United States Department of Justice in 2024 and was based on the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). According to the Ministry of Justice, TikTok left millions of young users on the platform while collecting their personal data, failing to fulfil the parental consent obligation required by law.
In addition to paying $400 million, the settlement agreement requires the platform to strengthen age identification-related controls, increase the protection set-up for minors and improve parents ' managerial capacity for children ' s account activities and personal information. The agreement did not require TikTok or byte beat to acknowledge misconduct.
After 2019, it's not enough.
The United States regulator had previously taken action against the company on similar issues. In 2019, the former TikTok Musical.ly reconciled the charges with $5.7 million and promised to prevent children under the age of 13 from creating accounts.
However, the action claimed that TikTok had not been able to effectively identify and clean up the younger users since then. The prosecution also mentioned that companies continued to retain and use some child information, including data that could be used for targeted advertising, after internal concerns had been raised about underage users.
The Ministry of Justice also alleged that TikTok had adjusted part of the policy in the registration process to make it more difficult for the outside world to judge whether users met the age threshold for using the platform.
User security issues are receiving renewed attention
Before this settlement was reached, TikTok had just received more scrutiny for another user security issue. Bloomberg recently reported that TikTok had closed an algorithm protection measure to about 10 per cent of United States users in an experiment. The measure was intended to reduce the risk of continued user exposure to harmful or potentially harmful content.
This report was subsequently criticized by parliamentarians. Republican Senator Martha Blackburn and Democratic Senator Richard Blumensar have written to Chief Executive Officer TikTok Zhou, as well as to the head of his United States operations, Adam Presser, requesting clarification of the decision.
- Amount settled: $400 million
- Related legislation: Child Online Privacy Protection Act
- Reconciliation: 2019 Musical.ly $5.7 million