TikTok Slapped with $367 Million Fine Over Bungled Kids’ Data

Everybody’s favourite app is unquestionably not within the good graces of the European Union. Irish regulators simply hit the large video-sharing platform with a $367 million superb for mishandling little one customers’ knowledge and gave the app three months to repair it.

TechCrunch reports that the EU discovered TikTok in violation of the Union’s Common Information Safety Regulation (GDPR) based mostly on the way it handles the information from accounts belonging to minors. The superb of €345 million, which is roughly $367 million on the time of writing, was issued to TikTok by the Irish Information Safety Fee. The regulators discovered TikTok responsible of violating two of the GDPR’s articles, together with breaches of lawfulness, equity, and transparency of information processing and the rights of the topic to obtain communication of information dealing with.

“We respectfully disagree with the choice, notably the extent of the superb imposed,” a TikTok spokesperson advised the outlet. “The DPC’s criticisms are targeted on options and settings that had been in place three years in the past, and that we made modifications to effectively earlier than the investigation even started, reminiscent of setting all below 16 accounts to non-public by default.”

Whereas the Irish Information Safety Fee discovered no concern with the way in which TikTok verified person ages, it did take concern with the platform’s default settings. The Fee argues that TikTok’s default settings enable anybody to view content material posted by all customers, whether or not they’re below the age of 13 or not. TikTok’s settings additionally enabled kids’s profiles to be set to default routinely, in keeping with TechCrunch.

This isn’t the primary time that TikTok has been slammed with a superb, particularly by way of the way it dealt with children’ knowledge. In 2019, TikTok paid $1.1 million after a lawsuit filed by dad and mom in the USA District Court docket for the Northern District of Illinois alleged that the app’s predecessor Musical.ly collected and offered figuring out knowledge to advertisers. Privacy regulators in the UK also threatened to fine TikTok in 2022 for processing account knowledge for youths below 13.