TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, agreed on Friday, August 21, 2026, to hand federal regulators $400 million, closing out a lawsuit that accused the platform of vacuuming up data from children under 13 without asking parents first. The Department of Justice's announcement frames the sum as one of the largest penalties ever extracted under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, a 1998 law meant to stop websites from quietly harvesting kids' personal details.