TikTok's predecessor settled in 2019, and the app was sued again

The short answer

The company now known as TikTok has faced two federal children's privacy actions five years apart: a 2019 settlement over the app then called Musical.ly, and a 2024 lawsuit still working through court. The first was resolved with a payment and specific promises; the second is a set of allegations a court has not yet decided. Both describe the same underlying worry, that a service popular with children under 13 was not reliably keeping them off, or protecting the ones who got on.

What the evidence says

In February 2019, the FTC announced that Musical.ly, the lip-sync app TikTok's owner had acquired and rebranded, agreed to pay $5.7 million, then the largest civil penalty the agency had obtained in a children's privacy case, according to its announcement of 27 February 2019. The FTC alleged the app collected names, email addresses, phone numbers and other information from children under 13 without parental consent, and the order required the company to comply with COPPA, remove videos made by known under-13 users, and notify parents before collecting a child's data. Five years later, on 2 August 2024, the Department of Justice and FTC sued TikTok and parent ByteDance, alleging in their filing that TikTok knowingly kept millions of under-13 accounts on a platform meant for users 13 and older, that age reviewers spent as little as five to seven seconds per account, and that children could sign up through third-party logins without any age check, creating accounts the company itself labelled 'age unknown'. The complaint also alleges TikTok collected activity data and persistent identifiers to target advertising without consent, slow-walked parents' deletion requests, and breached the 2019 order soon after agreeing to it. The government seeks civil penalties and a permanent injunction; these remain allegations a court has not yet resolved, and the underlying COPPA Rule both actions invoke has not changed.

For context

The distance between the two actions matters: 2019 is a closed settlement with terms the order itself states, while 2024 is an open complaint a court will test. Nothing here establishes what a judge will find, and it would be inaccurate to describe the 2024 allegations as proven facts. Together they show a repeated regulatory concern, one company across two administrations, over whether an age-13 line can be enforced by self-reported birthdates and brief manual reviews.

A practical next step

If a child under 13 has an account on a service meant for older teens, it may be worth checking how the account was created, since third-party logins can sometimes skip the age question entirely.

• Did your child sign up with an age they entered themselves, or through another account like Google?
• Would you know how to request deletion of a child's account and data, and how long that should take?
• Have you checked what a platform's own minimum age actually is, rather than assuming it matches your household's rule?

Whatever the 2024 case eventually decides, the 2019 settlement remains a resolved account of what one predecessor app was found to have done, on the terms the FTC's order actually states.