TikTok settles children's privacy case for $400M

The Justice Department has closed a two-year case alleging TikTok violated COPPA—the federal law that restricts how companies collect data from kids under 13—by paying $400 million. The settlement closes the government's enforcement action.

COPPA is the baseline: companies can't harvest data from children under 13 without verifiable parental consent. TikTok, whose user base skews heavily toward teens, was found to have collected biometric identifiers like facial recognition data from kids, violated notification requirements, and failed to delete data once a child's age was discovered. The FTC has a similar 2024 order, and this DOJ settlement runs parallel to it. Both are about the same core issue—apps that treat kids' data like inventory.

For la comunidad, this is about apps that pull in primos without asking whether their parents ever agreed to hand over their data. The settlement is money, but the real question is whether the rules actually stick when the algorithm keeps pushing younger users deeper into the app.

Why this matters for us: our kids are already on these platforms, and $400M doesn't change the fact that the apps are still built to harvest data from the youngest users.