Four hundred million over under-13 accounts

TikTok has settled the Department of Justice's children's privacy case. The structure is $300 million payable now and a further $100 million contingent on a court vacating an earlier consent decree covering Musical.ly, TikTok's predecessor. The agreement resolves the allegations without a judicial finding of liability.

What was alleged

• Knowingly allowing children under thirteen to create ordinary accounts outside Kids Mode.
• Collecting personal information from them without parental consent.
• Failing to delete accounts when parents asked.
• Lacking adequate procedures for identifying and removing underage accounts.

The number to compare it against

Musical.ly settled with the FTC in 2019 for $5.7 million over substantially the same conduct. The FTC referred a fresh investigation in 2024, the DoJ filed that year, and the settlement landed in August 2026. The penalty is roughly seventy times the first one.

For a compliance function the useful reading is not the headline figure but the sequence. A consent decree was entered, the conduct it covered recurred, and the second enforcement was priced against the fact that a first one had already happened. That is the escalation path a privacy programme is actually managing: the second finding on the same control, not the first.

TikTok says it has since changed ownership, data management, retention practice, age controls and parental oversight. Those changes are what the remaining $100 million is negotiating over.