TikTok Agrees to $400 Million Settlement Over Children’s Privacy Violations

TikTok and its parent company ByteDance have agreed to pay $400 million to settle a US Department of Justice lawsuit over alleged violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

The settlement, announced on Friday, resolves claims that the platform collected personal information from millions of users under the age of 13 without obtaining verifiable parental consent and failed to honour deletion requests. Under the terms, TikTok will pay $300 million immediately and an additional $100 million once a court vacates a 2019 consent decree that applied to its predecessor Musical.ly.

The Justice Department described the recovery as one of the largest ever obtained in a COPPA case. Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. said the priority was ensuring children are protected online and that companies meet their legal obligations.

The original lawsuit was filed in 2024 in the Central District of California under the previous administration. The current settlement cites significant changes in TikTok’s management, ownership structure and privacy practices since then, including stronger age-related controls and parental oversight tools.

Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate stated that children and parents are better protected today than when the case began. The agreement also drops the earlier FTC privacy order for the first time.

Previous major COPPA settlements include YouTube’s $170 million in 2019 and Epic Games’ $275 million in 2022. Dozens of US states are currently pursuing separate privacy cases against Meta under the same statute.

The resolution closes a multi-year enforcement action while leaving open the broader question of how social platforms will handle age verification and data minimisation for younger users going forward.