Britain’s privacy watchdog hit TikTok with a multimillion-dollar penalty Tuesday for misusing children’s data and violating other protections for young users’ personal information.
The Information Commissioner’s Office said it issued a high quality of 12.7 million kilos ($15.9 million) to the short-video sharing app, which is wildly popular with young people.
It’s the newest example of tighter scrutiny that TikTok and its parent, Chinese technology company ByteDance, are facing within the West, where governments are increasingly concerned about risks that the app poses to data privacy and cybersecurity.
The British watchdog, which was investigating data breaches between May 2018 and July 2020, said TikTok allowed as many as 1.4 million children within the U.K. under 13 to make use of the app in 2020, despite the platform’s own rules prohibiting children that young from organising accounts.
TikTok didn’t adequately discover and take away children under 13 from the platform, the watchdog said.
And despite the fact that it knew younger children were using the app, TikTok didn’t get consent from their parents to process their data, as required by Britain’s data protection laws, the agency said.
“There are laws in place to be sure our youngsters are as protected within the digital world as they’re within the physical world. TikTok didn’t abide by those laws,” Information Commissioner John Edwards said in a press release.
TikTok collected and used personal data of kids who were inappropriately given access to the app, he said.
“That signifies that their data can have been used to trace them and profile them, potentially delivering harmful, inappropriate content at their very next scroll,” Edwards said.
The corporate said it disagreed with the watchdog’s decision.
“We invest heavily to assist keep under 13s off the platform and our 40,000-strong safety team works across the clock to assist keep the platform protected for our community,” TikTok said in statement. “We are going to proceed to review the choice and are considering next steps.”
TIkTok says it has improved its sign-up system because the breaches happened by not allowing users to easily declare they’re sufficiently old and in search of other signs that an account is utilized by someone under 13.
