Report from MediaPost
In Brief – US District Judge George Wu has rejected a proposed $400 million settlement between the Justice Department and TikTok over allegations that the platform violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by collecting personal information from users under 13 without parental consent. The proposed settlement intended to resolve an August 2024 complaint alleging TikTok allowed children 12 and younger to bypass its Kids Mode restrictions on data collection and also vacated a 2019 Federal Trade Commission order requiring TikTok to pay $5 million and comply with restrictions stemming from similar COPPA allegations involving its predecessor, Musical.ly. The Justice Department argued the 2019 order was no longer necessary because it did not involve TikTok as it operates today. Wu said the government failed to make that case and rejected the argument that TikTok’s change in ownership away from Chinese-based ByteDance changed its legal obligations under COPPA. Wu allowed the Justice Department to amend and refile its settlement request.
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 a major reason that 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 now-passed anti-TikTok furor, and COPPA violations were a major component of the recently settled multi-state federal lawsuit against Meta.