TikTok and its parent company ByteDance have agreed to a $400 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice to resolve allegations that the platform violated federal children’s privacy law. The settlement was reached in August 2026, two years after the DOJ first filed the lawsuit.
The case, originally brought in 2024 under the Biden administration, alleged that TikTok violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by allowing millions of children under 13 to use the platform and collecting their personal data without the required parental consent. The DOJ also alleged that TikTok changed its registration policies in ways that made it harder to determine whether users were old enough to join the service, and that the company continued using children’s data — including for targeted advertising — even after employees flagged concerns internally.
Beyond the financial penalty, the settlement requires TikTok to implement stronger age-related controls, additional safeguards for young users, and tools giving parents greater oversight of their children’s activity and personal information. The agreement does not require TikTok or ByteDance to admit wrongdoing.
This is not TikTok’s first COPPA-related settlement. In 2019, the company paid $5.7 million to resolve similar allegations tied to its predecessor app, Musical.ly, and committed at that time to preventing children under 13 from creating accounts. The 2024 lawsuit alleged TikTok failed to uphold those commitments.
The settlement arrives amid heightened scrutiny of TikTok’s safety practices. Days before the agreement was announced, Bloomberg reported that TikTok had intentionally disabled an algorithmic safeguard for roughly 10% of U.S. users as part of an experiment — a safeguard designed to limit users’ exposure to harmful content. The report prompted Republican senator Marsha Blackburn and Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal to send a letter to TikTok CEO Shou Chew and U.S. business chief Adam Presser questioning the decision.
Source: TechCrunch