WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 -- The millions of American parents who trusted TikTok to keep their young children off the platform received no compensation this week. The $400 million that ByteDance agreed to pay the Justice Department will go directly to the United States Treasury, the largest settlement in the history of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, and not a cent of it to any of the families whose children's data the platform collected without their knowledge.

TikTok and its Chinese parent company agreed Thursday to pay the record sum to settle allegations that the platform knowingly permitted children under 13 to create accounts on its main app and collected their personal data without obtaining the parental consent that feder...