TikTok fined £12.7m over Alleged Misuse of Children’s Data

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The UK authority fined TikTok £12.7 million to feed a number of data protection laws violations, involving failing to use children’s personal information lawfully. Despite its own rules prohibiting children under 13 from opening an account, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) predicts that TikTok permitted as many as 1.4 million UK children according to 13 access to its platform in 2020.

According the provisions of the UK, General Data Protection Regulation, businesses that use personal data to provide minors under 13 with information society services must have the parents’ or guardians’ permission.

Even though TikTok should have known that minors under the age of 13 were using its website, according to the ICO, it did not do that. Additionally, TikTok did not conduct sufficient investigations to find and remove children under the age of 18 from its website.

The ICO probe revealed that some senior employees raised internal concerns about young users accessing the site and without being blocked. The ICO deemed TikTok’s answer to be insufficient.

Along a “notice of intent” released last year, the regulator originally suggested a £27 million fine, however the total £12.7 million fine announced the previous day is considerably lower than that sum. The UK’s information commissioner, John Edwards, stated that laws are in place to ensure that minors are just as safe online as they are offline. TikTok disregarded those rules.”

As a consequence, TikTok unreasonably allowed an estimated million children under the age of 13 access to the website, where their personal information was collected and used. That suggests that their data may have been used to profile them, track them, and potentially present them with offensive material as they scroll.TikTok should have been more intelligent. TikTok should have done better. The possibly dire repercussions of their errors are reflected in our £12.7 million fine. They did not do enough to keep track of who was using the platform or take the necessary measures to remove the minors from it.

“While we differ with the ICO’s ruling, and these encompasses May 2018–July 2020, we’re are glad to discover that the fine revealed today was successfully reduced to less than half the sum that was proposed last year,” a TikTok spokesperson told the BBC. We are considering our options as we continue to evaluate the choice.

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