TikTok agreed to pay $400 million in the U.S. to settle a lawsuit alleging that its platform violated children’s privacy.
U.S. government attorneys reported that more than 170 million teenagers were using TikTok and that the app “was marketed to children.” However, it did not effectively verify users’ ages or obtain parental consent for minors to use the app.
ΣΧΕΤΙΚΑ ΑΡΘΡΑ
This is one of the largest settlements ever reached on this issue, the BBC notes.
Under the terms of the agreement, TikTok and ByteDance will immediately pay the Department of Justice $300 million and an additional $100 million when the U.S. government lifts the 2019 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The agreement stems from a lawsuit filed in 2024 by the Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden, in which it alleged that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, collected “massive amounts of data” on millions of users under the age of 13.
This practice violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal law enacted in the U.S. in 2000. This is the same law under which dozens of U.S. states have now filed lawsuits against Meta.
Among the other companies that have paid fines to the U.S. government for COPPA violations are Google’s YouTube, which paid $170 million in 2019, and Epic Games, which paid $275 million in 2022.
Meta is now also facing fines that could exceed hundreds of billions of dollars, resulting from COPPA violations alleged by the attorneys general of 29 U.S. states. The jury trial for the case began this week, with the owner of Instagram and Facebook accused of targeting child users and profiting from them.
While the lawsuit against TikTok predates last year’s separation of TikTok’s U.S. operations and businesses from its original headquarters in China, the settlement applies only to TikTok’s operations in China.
ByteDance was recently valued by investors at $550 billion.
Source: Proto Thema
