DOJ and TikTok reach $400 million settlement amid child privacy violation | Latest Tech News
The Justice Department and TikTok have reached a $400 million settlement to resolve allegations the favored video sharing app violated youngsters’s online privacy.
Under the Biden administration, the DOJ sued TikTok and its Chinese-owned father or mother company ByteDance for allegedly violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which bans web sites from gathering, utilizing or disclosing personal info from youngsters under the age of 13 without parental consent.
The US Justice Department and TikTok have agreed on a $400 million settlement to resolve allegations that the social media app violated youngsters’s online privacy. AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato
The DOJ initially sued the platform along with ByteDance in 2024 for allegedly failing to shield youngsters’s privacy online while also illegally gathering data. REUTERS
“This settlement is a major victory for American children and parents,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a assertion. “The Department’s precedence is making certain that youngsters are protected online and that firms entrusted with their personal info meet their legal obligations.
“This resolution secures a substantial recovery while reinforcing the protections that families expect and deserve.”
The lawsuit, filed in August of 2024, alleged that TikTok held onto “a wide variety” of youngsters’s personal info without their dad and mom’ approval – even those youngsters who signed up for TikTok’s “Kid Mode,” a model of the app for customers under 13.
The DOJ claimed TikTok even failed to delete some youngsters’s accounts after dad and mom’ requests.
The civil lawsuit is being dismissed with prejudice, which means the DOJ can’t deliver the same COPPA declare against the businesses again.
The settlement comes after ByteDance agreed to set up a majority American-owned three way partnership in January to keep away from a US ban on the app, which is used by more than 200 million Americans.
The DOJ famous in its settlement announcement that TikTok “has undergone significant changes to its ownership, management, compliance functions, and privacy practices” since the lawsuit was introduced.
The Trump administration credited TikTok and Bytedance with having “implemented extensive measures designed to strengthen safeguards for younger users, improve age-related controls, and enhance parental oversight,” since the possession modifications.
“Those developments have materially advanced the public interests underlying the Department’s litigation and have strengthened protections for millions of American families,” the DOJ said.
TikTok didn’t immediately reply to The Post’s request for remark.
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