$92 Million TikTok Privacy Settlement: What It Paid and Whether You Can Still Claim

Users filed a series of lawsuits against TikTok, Inc. (formerly Musical.ly), ByteDance, Inc., TikTok, Ltd., and Beijing ByteDance Technology Co. Ltd. The cases were combined into a multidistrict litigation, MDL No. 2948, before Judge John Z. Lee in the Northern District of Illinois.

The plaintiffs claimed the defendants collected and used users' personal data without sufficient notice and consent through the TikTok app and its predecessor, Musical.ly. The allegations focused in particular on whether the app's video features collected, kept, and shared facial recognition or other biometric information. Claims were brought under federal and state laws, including the Video Privacy Protection Act and, for Illinois users, the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.

Under Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act, a person can recover $1,000 in liquidated damages for each negligent violation and $5,000 for each intentional or reckless violation. That is why Illinois users were placed in a separate subclass and paid more. The defendants denied the allegations. For how the Illinois law works, see our BIPA explainer, and for current claims against the company, our TikTok lawsuit page.

The settlement had two groups:

• Nationwide Class: everyone living in the United States who used the app before September 30, 2021.
• Illinois Subclass: everyone living in Illinois who used the app in Illinois to create videos before September 30, 2021.

The court also had to deal with a separate earlier case brought on behalf of minors, T.K. v. Bytedance Technology Co.; the settlement website notes that people who took part in that case could also file a claim here.

Parents and guardians could file on behalf of minor children, which mattered because many TikTok and Musical.ly users were minors. The court's approval opinion estimated the Nationwide Class at 89 million people and the Illinois Subclass at 1.4 million people.

Anyone who used TikTok for the first time on or after September 30, 2021 was never in this class. People who excluded themselves by January 31, 2022 kept their right to sue separately but received nothing. Everyone else in the class released these claims whether or not they filed. For what that release means, see can you be bound by a class action settlement.

Under the plan of allocation, each Nationwide Class claimant received one share of the net fund, and each Illinois Subclass claimant received six (one as a Nationwide member plus five as an Illinois member).

Group	Shares	Estimate cited at final approval
Nationwide Class	1	$27.19
Illinois Subclass	6	$163.13

The court's July 28, 2022 opinion reported 1,215,541 valid claims: 1,038,517 from Nationwide Class members only and 177,024 from people in both the Nationwide Class and the Illinois Subclass. With about 89 million class members, that is a claim rate of roughly 1.4%. The opinion noted that the average claims rate for classes over 2.7 million people is about 1.4%.

Class counsel asked for $30,660,539.91 in fees, which worked out to about 34.9% of the net fund. The judge approved fees of one-third of the net common fund and, in allocating fees among firms, noted that the total request had been reduced by nearly $1.4 million. The per-claimant figures in the table are the estimates the court cited; the administrator's website does not post a final accounting of what each claimant actually received, so your payment may differ by a small amount. Several objectors challenged the settlement and the fee request, arguing among other things that notice should have reached more users; the judge overruled those objections and approved the deal.

Claims were filed online or by mail by March 1, 2022. The notice said payments would be made electronically unless a claimant chose another method.

1. Judge Lee granted final approval in a memorandum opinion on July 28, 2022, and entered the order and final judgment on August 22, 2022.
2. An appeal was filed on September 20, 2022, which put payments on hold.
3. The Seventh Circuit dismissed the appeal on October 12, 2022.
4. The settlement administrator began issuing payments on October 26, 2022.

Beyond money, the settlement required TikTok to change some data practices going forward. According to the approval opinion, unless expressly disclosed in TikTok's privacy policy, the defendants agreed not to use the app to collect or store U.S. users' biometric information, collect GPS data, collect clipboard contents, transmit user data outside the United States, store it in databases abroad, or upload content before a user saves or publishes it. They also agreed to a privacy training and compliance program, monitored by a third party for three years. Those terms protected all U.S. users of the app, not only the people who filed claims.

If you filed a valid claim and do not remember being paid, check the email account and PayPal, Venmo, or bank account you used in 2022. Electronic payments can go unclaimed if the email address was mistyped. If you filed for a child, the payment may have gone to the parent's email or account listed on the form. You can reach the administrator, Angeion Group, through the contact page on the official settlement website. Our guide on what to do if you have not received a settlement payment covers the steps. We do not track claims for anyone.

Event	Date
Class cutoff (app use before)	September 30, 2021
Opt-out and objection deadline	January 31, 2022
Claim deadline	March 1, 2022
Final approval opinion	July 28, 2022
Order and final judgment	August 22, 2022
Appeal dismissed	October 12, 2022
Payments began	October 26, 2022

As of September 2026, the TikTok settlement has paid out and there is no open claim process. Reports of small later deposits circulate online, but the official website has not posted a notice of a supplemental distribution, so we do not treat them as confirmed. For how leftover money is usually handled, see what happens to unclaimed settlement money.

If you did not file by March 1, 2022, you cannot receive money from this settlement, and if you were a class member who did not opt out, you released the claims it covered. The TikTok claim deadline was March 1, 2022, and the class only covered people who used the app before September 30, 2021.

Other lawsuits involving TikTok have been filed since, and they are separate from this privacy settlement. If you are a parent concerned about a child's heavy use of social media apps, see our page on social media addiction lawsuits.

Be wary of anyone who says they can "reopen" your TikTok settlement claim for a fee. No settlement administrator charges class members to be paid, and the official website lists no new claim period.

Illinois's biometric privacy law has produced some of the largest per-person privacy payouts in the country. The TikTok approval opinion compared the settlement favorably to other privacy cases, including a Video Privacy Protection Act settlement that paid $16.50 per claim. For another Illinois biometric case, see the Snapchat BIPA settlement, and for a large app privacy case, the Facebook privacy settlement.

If you believe an app collected your face scans, voiceprints, or fingerprints without consent after the periods covered by earlier settlements, a free case review can connect you with independent attorneys who handle biometric privacy claims.