TikTok has been fined £12.7m ($15.8m) by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for misusing children’s data. The fine followed an investigation that found TikTok had collected personal data belonging to over a million children under 13 without parental consent, a breach of data protection law.
Up to 1.4 million children in Britain used the platform in 2020 despite TikTok’s own rules not allowing children to create an account.
The company was found to have failed to get parental consent or adequately identify and remove underage children from its platform.
An initial notice of intent to fine TikTok had set the penalty at £27m ($33m) although this was ultimately reduced.
TikTok claimed that its safety team works around the clock to keep the platform safe for its community, although the ICO said that TikTok had failed to do enough to check who was using its platform or take sufficient action to remove underage children.
France fined TikTok €5m ($5.4m) in January for making it difficult for users to opt out of being tracked on its website. John Edwards, the UK Information Commissioner, said that there are laws in place to ensure that children are as safe in the digital world as they are in the physical world, and that TikTok did not abide by those laws.
He warned that as a consequence of TikTok breaching data protection rules, children’s data may have been used to track them and profile them, potentially delivering harmful, inappropriate content at their very next scroll.
