In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice, on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, accused the social network TikTok of improperly registering the accounts of millions of U.S. users under the age of 13 because the program did not involve obtaining parental consent. ByteDance, which owns TikTok, recently agreed to pay a $400 million fine in the lawsuit.
Image credit: Unsplash, Aaron Weiss
From a U.S. legal perspective, the explanation is as follows BloombergThe problem is also that the process of deleting TikTok accounts at the request of parents of underage users is very complicated. To sum up, the social network TikTok has been accused of illegally collecting data on minor residents of the United States. Under the terms of the deal reached this week, ByteDance will pay an initial $300 million and then an additional $100 million upon completion of legal proceedings related to the FTC’s 2019 claims against the Musical.ly platform, considered the predecessor to TikTok. The Chinese company has paid a $5.7 million fine as a result of the lawsuit.
In January this year, ByteDance agreed to form a joint venture with U.S. investors to be responsible for TikTok’s U.S. assets and manage local users’ personal data. In its appeal to the court, the joint venture said it requires all users to indicate their date of birth when registering for the site. The company developed sophisticated algorithms to identify users under 13 who provided inaccurate age information. Compliance in this area is monitored by a staff of hundreds of administrators, who regularly remove tens of thousands of accounts belonging to users under the age of 13. The pretrial agreement TikTok reached this week with the U.S. Department of Justice requires approval from the U.S. Department of Justice.
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