BBC:
TikTok has agreed to pay $400m (£293m) to the US to end a lawsuit alleging its platform violated children‘s privacy, marking one of the largest ever settlements over the issue.
The deal stems from a 2024 suit by the Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden alleging TikTok and its parent company ByteDance collected “vast amounts of data” on millions of users under the age of 13.
Doing so was against the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal law enacted in 2000. It is the same law that dozens of US states are now suing Meta over.
“Children and parents are better protected today than they were when this case began,” assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said.
Other companies to have paid penalties to the US government for COPPA violations include Google’s YouTube, which in 2019 paid $170m, and Epic Games, which in 2022 paid $275m.
Meta is also now facing penalties that could exceed hundreds of billions of dollars stemming from COPPA violations alleged by attorneys general of 29 US states. A jury trial in the lawsuit started this week, with the Instagram and Facebook owner accused of targeting child users and profiting off of them.
While the TikTok lawsuit predates last year’s split of TikTok’s US business and operations from its original base of China, the settlement only involves TikTok’s operations in China.
ByteDance, which is a privately held company, was most recently valued by investors at $550bn.
