TikTok ordered to pay $400 Million to US Department of Justice over collection of children’s data

Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok is set to pay the US Department of Justice (DoJ) $400 million in a settlement after a two-year lawsuit over violations of child privacy laws. The US DoJ sued TikTok, claiming it knew 13-year-olds were using the app and that the app failed to obtain parents’ consent before collecting their names and email addresses.

Under the settlement conditions, TikTok must pay $300 million immediately. TikTok will pay the remaining $100 million after a previously enforced privacy order on Musical.ly is lifted. Musical.ly was TikTok’s predecessor app before ByteDance acquired it in 2018. ByteDance is the Chinese company that originally created TikTok as Douyin, and after acquiring Musical.ly, it merged the two apps to create TikTok.

Because the Trump administration was increasingly restricting Chinese goods and services on all fronts, it considered banning TikTok altogether. As a result, in January 2026, ByteDance was pushed to agree to a majority US-owned joint venture to avoid losing around 200 million American users. ByteDance owns only 20% of the joint venture, with the rest owned by US tech titans like Oracle.

TikTok has made significant privacy upgrades since the lawsuit was filed

While the trial was underway, the US government conceded that TikTok had made substantial upgrades to its privacy and compliance practices compared with when the original complaint was filed. The US Attorney General, Brett Shumate, stated: “Children and parents are better protected today than they were when this case began.” According to a court filing, TikTok says users must now enter their date of birth to use the site. For cases where children under 13 pretend to be older, TikTok disclosed that it was using age-moderation systems to determine their true age.

Regarding the settlement, Associate US Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. declared: “This settlement is a major victory for American children and parents.” He also followed up by reaffirming the DoJ’s priority of “ensuring that children are protected online and that companies entrusted with their personal information meet their legal obligations”.

Privacy law breaches related to children by tech firms are increasing at an alarming rate. In 2019, Google’s YouTube paid $170 million for violating children’s privacy legislation. Epic Games, another US-based digital game store, paid $275 million in 2022 for related violations.

More recently, Instagram, which is owned by Meta, has also been sued for violating children’s privacy across 29 US states. If the social media giant is found guilty, Meta could be fined and face claims amounting to billions of dollars.