Report from MediaPost
In Brief – TikTok has agreed to pay $400 million to settle Justice Department allegations that it violated the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by collecting personal information from users under 13. The settlement resolves a complaint filed in August 2024 alleging that TikTok, then owned by ByteDance, allowed children 12 and younger to bypass its “Kids Mode” that limited data collection, and that TikTok failed to comply with a 2019 Federal Trade Commission settlement over similar privacy violations. The Justice Department has agreed to vacate the 2019 conditions saying that they relate to practices of TikTok’s predecessor rather than the platform as it operates today. TikTok will pay $300 million immediately and another $100 million after the prior order is vacated.
Context – COPPA, enacted in 1998, is a foundational internet law requiring online services to obtain parental consent before collecting personal information from children under 13, which is why 13 has been the minimum user age for many websites for decades. Of course, children under 13, often with their parents’ knowledge, have been using popular online services for just as long, and platforms generally knew that some underage users were part of their audience. As social media anger increased in the late 2010’s, charges that big platforms violated COPPA were a core part of the anti-social media playbook because they rested on settled law. In 2019, Google agreed to pay a $170 million fine to the FTC and change a range of YouTube practices for users under age 13, TikTok also reached a COPPA settlement in 2019 and faced new charges in 2024 in the midst of the anti-TikTok furor, and COPPA violations are a main component of the massive multi-state federal lawsuit against Meta. TikTok regulation has turned a page since the platform’s US operations were sold to US-based owners, and COPPA is now almost an afterthought in social media regulation debates as critics focus on so-called addictive platform features like auto-play and notifications and aim for restrictions up to ages 16, and even 18.