TikTok has agreed to pay $400 million to settle a US government lawsuit accusing it of collecting the personal data of children under 13 without their parents' consent, according to TechCrunch.
A note on sourcing before the detail: we were able to verify this account from one publication only. Government press releases and the wire services were not reachable to us at the time of writing, and we have not seen the settlement document itself. What follows is TikTok's settlement as TechCrunch reports it, and we will update the piece against the primary filing when we can obtain it.
The case
The suit was brought in 2024 by the US Department of Justice under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, the 1998 statute known as COPPA that governs how online services may treat users under 13. COPPA's central requirement is simple to state: if a service knows it has under-13 users, it must obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting their personal information.
The government's allegation was that TikTok did not. It said the company allowed millions of children under 13 onto the platform, retained and used their data for targeted advertising, altered its registration flow in ways that obscured age checks, and failed to find and remove underage accounts despite an earlier federal action against it.
That last point is the part that makes this case unusual. A repeat allegation against a company that has already been the subject of federal enforcement is treated far more seriously than a first offense, and it is a reasonable inference that this is part of why the figure is as large as it is. The reporting does not attribute the amount to any particular factor, and we have not seen the earlier order.
What TikTok agreed to
The agreement does not require TikTok or its parent ByteDance to admit wrongdoing. That is standard in settlements of this kind and it matters: it means the case establishes no finding of fact that another plaintiff can build on.
Alongside the payment, the company accepts non-monetary obligations: stronger age-related controls, additional safeguards for children on the platform, and expanded tools for parents to oversee what their children do and what information is collected about them.
The report does not say whether a court has approved the settlement, and consent decrees of this type ordinarily require judicial sign-off before they take effect. No statement from TikTok was included, and no official was quoted.
The wider pressure
The settlement lands while TikTok is under scrutiny from more than one direction on child safety. The reporting notes that Marsha Blackburn, a Republican senator, and Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, have jointly written to the company questioning its safety practices, a pairing that is itself informative: the political consensus against the platform on this issue crosses the aisle in a way that little else in US technology policy does.
Whether $400 million changes behavior is a separate question from whether it is a large sum. For a platform of TikTok's revenue it is a cost of doing business; the durable part of the settlement, if it works, is the compliance machinery, because that is what a regulator can come back and measure.
