TikTok agrees to pay nearly £300 million in US children's privacy settlement

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The Justice Department (DoJ) sued TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, for allegedly failing to protect children's privacy and illegally collecting their information.

The defendants were accused of violating a law requiring online services aimed at children to obtain parental consent to collect personal information from users under age 13.

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said the Justice Department's priority "is ensuring that children are protected online and that companies entrusted with their personal information meet their legal obligations."

TikTok did not immediately comment.

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The social media firm will pay $300m immediately and a further $100m after an order vacates an earlier consent decree against its predecessor company, Musical.ly, the DoJ said on Friday.

As part of the agreement, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said that TikTok, then known as Musical.ly, had known that the app had failed to get parental consent to collect their names, email addresses and other personal information of young people.

It paid a fine of $5.7 million.

The settlement comes as social media companies face a wave of lawsuits over children's safety and privacy, and a growing number of countries are banning young kids and teens from social media apps.

In January, ByteDance agreed to establish a majority American-owned joint venture to secure US data and avoid a US ban on the app used by more than 200 million Americans.

The government noted that since the complaint was filed, TikTok has undergone significant changes to its ownership, management, compliance functions, and privacy practices.

DOJ said the settlement "ensures that American families continue to benefit from stronger protections without the delay and uncertainty of protracted litigation."

The TikTok US joint venture said in a court filing that it requires all users to enter their date of birth to use the site.

TikTok said it has developed sophisticated age-moderation systems that identify children under 13 who misrepresented their age.

That court filing said that TikTok has hundreds of personnel trained in underage moderation and, as a result, deletes tens of thousands of underage accounts.

TikTok is also among several other companies facing scrutiny after comments from Ireland's justice minister that social media companies are responsible for not allowing posts that "glorify criminal behaviour" after five teenagers died when the car they were in was driven the wrong way up the M9.