The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has managed to extract $400 million from TikTok, and this is not a story about the company being forced to change its ways – but pay up nonetheless.
The settlement, which means no admission of wrongdoing on the part of TikTok, will see the company pay $300 million now, and another $100 million once a prior consent decree is vacated.
That earlier decree came from a 2019 case, United States v. Musical.ly, an app that was later folded into TikTok. The current case, United States v. ByteDance, was filed in 2024 and is now dismissed with prejudice.
The original complaint accused ByteDance of violating the COPPA Rule by letting children slip past TikTok’s age gate and “knowingly creating accounts for children and collecting data from those children” without “verifiable parental consent.”
The 2019 consent decree also sought to ensure that the company would get “verifiable parental consent” before collecting personal information from children.
The settlement reached now requires TikTok to change absolutely nothing.
The DOJ explains this by saying that since the 2024 filing, TikTok “has undergone significant changes to its ownership, management, compliance functions, and privacy practices” and “implemented extensive measures designed to strengthen safeguards for younger users, improve age-related controls, and enhance parental oversight.”
Those changes “have materially advanced the public interests underlying the Department’s litigation and have strengthened protections for millions of American families,” the DOJ said.
And what is “verifiable parental consent” that’s the main aspect of the original complaint and the 2019 consent decree? That’s where things get interesting. COPPA doesn’t mandate any specific method, but lists several, which escalate quickly from a signed consent form, to a payment from a parent’s credit or debit card, to submitting a government-issued ID and matching it to a face scan, or being verified over video call.
In other words, proving that a parent has given consent tends to boil down to proving who everyone is.
Hellbound and Down 