TikTok settles with feds over child safety for $400M

Filed 5d ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: M.O. Stevens · CC BY 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

ByteDance agreed to pay $400 million to settle a Justice Department lawsuit alleging TikTok violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by letting millions of children under 13 open regular accounts without parental consent.

The government's 2024 complaint said kids could simply enter false birthdays or sign in via Instagram or Google to dodge the platform's Kids Mode entirely, despite TikTok collecting extensive data on them and allegedly ignoring parental deletion requests.

TikTok will pay $300 million upfront and another $100 million once a separate injunction against predecessor Musical.ly is vacated at a September hearing. The settlement arrives alongside TikTok's forced restructuring away from Chinese ownership over national security concerns.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward calls this a major victory for children and parents, which is one way to describe a company writing a check after years of letting kids lie about their age with zero friction. The real safeguard here was apparently a fake birthday field, and no amount of settlement-day triumphalism changes that it worked for years.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Hamster March · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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