TikTok agreed to pay $ 92 million in a deal to settle a group of US class action lawsuits that accuse the video-sharing platform of violating the privacy of young users.

A lawsuit filed in federal court in Illinois urged a judge to agree to a settlement that includes TikTok being more transparent about data collection and training employees on user privacy.

The lawsuit included 21 group cases targeting "TikTok" and its parent company, "Bytedance," in China.

Illinois lawyers wrote in the lawsuit, "The TikTok application infiltrates users' devices and extracts a wide range of private data, including vital data that the platform uses to track users (...) for the purpose of targeting them with ads and thus making profits."

The attorneys estimated that the settlement would involve 89 million users in the United States, most of whom would qualify for 96 cents each if they all filed claims for the settlement funds.

The lawyers also accused TikTok of sending or storing the data in China, where the parent company is based.

TikTok denied any misuse of data, saying it only uses anonymous marks to discover the location of the faces and that it leaves that data on users' devices, according to the legal papers.

Lawyers told the judge that ByteDance had been pushed into the settlement due to pressure from US officials to sell TikTok.

It was reported that the administration of US President Joe Biden had halted his predecessor Donald Trump's plan to sell TikTok to the US technology giant, Oracle, with Walmart as a retail partner.