TikTok settles child privacy concerns case with US government for $400m

TikTok has reached a $400 million settlement in a lawsuit brought by the US government that accused the company of illegally gathering children’s information.The 2024 suit, filed under the Biden administration, claimed that TikTok had gathered data from users under the age of 13 without parental permission. The suit, brought by the US justice department, accused TikTok of knowingly allowing children to create accounts and of failing to honour parents’ requests to delete their children’s accounts.TikTok violated federal privacy law along with a 2019 agreement with the US government in which the app promised to take steps to protect children’s privacy, according to the case. READ MOREUnder the settlement announced Friday, TikTok will pay $300 million. The department also asked the court to eliminate the 2019 agreement, after which TikTok would pay the government an additional $100 million, according to a department statement. The settlement is the latest by the Trump administration, as it takes a softer approach toward ongoing government litigation against several big companies.In March, the Justice Department settled a lawsuit that accused Live Nation, the owner of Ticketmaster, of illegally maintaining a monopoly. The US government also reached a settlement last year that allowed the technology company Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy a rival, Juniper Networks, over the objection of some state attorneys general.The settlement between TikTok and the US also marks the latest win for the popular short-video app under the second Trump administration.During Donald Trump’s first term, he signed an executive order to force the app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell it. But TikTok successfully sued to block that ban. In 2024, former president Joe Biden signed a law that would ban the app unless it was sold to a non-Chinese owner.After Trump returned to office, he repeatedly delayed enforcement of that law. In January, ByteDance announced that it had reached a deal, hammered out with the US government, that spun off its American operations to a group of non-Chinese investors. – New York Times2026 The New York Times Company