Saw this news today and honestly, the $400 million number caught my attention.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/08/tiktok-agrees-to-400-million-settlement.html

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that TikTok and ByteDance will pay $400 million to settle a case involving alleged violations of children’s privacy laws. $300 million will be paid immediately, with another $100 million tied to the settlement terms.

But what actually surprised me wasn't just the amount, how it'll pay that much money?

It made me think about how much information these platforms can collect from us and maybe sell those data to data brokers.

We open TikTok for a few minutes, watch some videos, skip others, scroll hours, search for something, stop on a particular video, and suddenly the algorithm seems to understand what we are interested in.

Then I started to wonder where does all this information go, and how valuable is it?

TikTok doesn't simply make money by "selling our data." A huge part of its business is advertising, and the data it collects helps make those ads and recommendations more targeted. (Company tells this but inside who knows)

That's the part I find interesting.

Our attention is free, but our behaviour has a value.

And when a company is willing to fight a $400 million legal battle over privacy, it makes me wonder just how valuable that behaviour really is.