TikTok Agrees to Pay $4 Billion in Settlement Over Children's Data

TikTok has agreed to pay the US government $4 billion (5,500 billion won) to settle a lawsuit alleging that the company mishandled children's personal data. This is the largest settlement ever made regarding children's data protection issues. The agreement stems from a lawsuit initiated by the Biden administration in 2024, which claimed that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, collected data from hundreds of thousands of users under the age of 13. TikTok was accused of violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law enacted in 2000 to protect children's online personal data. Google and Epic Games also paid fines to the US government for violating the children's data protection law, with Google paying $170 million in 2019 and Epic Games paying $275 million in 2022.