Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner said on Friday that it had imposed a fine of 345 million euros ($370 million) on TikTok for violating privacy laws in handling the personal data of minors in the European Union.
The Irish Data Protection Commissioner is the main EU regulator responsible for dealing with many of the world’s largest technology companies that are headquartered in Ireland.
The Data Protection Commissioner said in a statement that the Chinese-owned short video platform, which has rapidly spread among minors around the world in the past few years, violated a number of privacy laws in the European Union between July 31 and December 31, 2020.
This is the first time that TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, has been subject to a penalty from the Data Protection Commissioner in Ireland.
A TikTok spokesperson said he disagreed with the decision, particularly with the size of the fine, and that most of the criticism was no longer relevant as a result of the actions the company took before the European regulator’s investigation began in September 2021.
The Data Protection Commissioner said that TikTok’s violations included placing the accounts of users under the age of 16 in 2020 in the standard “public” classification, and that TikTok did not verify whether the user was actually the parent or guardian of the minor user when linking the account to the “parental supervision” feature. “.
TikTok added stricter parental controls to its parental supervision feature in November 2020 and changed the standard settings for all users under the age of 16 to “Private” in January 2021.
TikTok said on Friday that it intends to add amendments to its privacy materials to make the difference between public and private accounts clearer, and that the private account will be predetermined for new users between the ages of 16 and 17 years when they register in the application from later this month.
The Data Protection Commissioner gave TikTok three months to bring all its processing that was marred by violations of the rules.
2023-09-15 16:24:47
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