TikTok to pay $400m to US in one of largest child privacy settlements - BBC

The case originated from a 2024 Department of Justice suit filed under former President Joe Biden, accusing TikTok and its parent company ByteDance of collecting vast amounts of data on millions of users under the age of 13. The settlement resolves those allegations without TikTok admitting wrongdoing, though the dollar figure alone signals how seriously federal regulators treated the claims.

Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said children and parents are better protected today than they were when the case began. For families here in Lubbock, that means kids scrolling TikTok at home in Raintree or anywhere else in the country were part of a data collection practice large enough to draw one of the biggest privacy penalties the federal government has ever extracted from a tech company.

The $400 million figure puts this settlement in rare company among COPPA enforcement actions, the federal law designed to protect children under 13 online. Most parents probably never knew their child's data was being swept up, and most kids certainly did not.

$400 million sounds enormous until you consider ByteDance's scale, and then the question becomes whether that number actually changes anything.