2023-09-15 18:05:00
TikTok Technology Limited will have to pay administrative fines totaling 345 million euros.
A European Union (EU) regulator imposed this Friday a fine of 345 million euros the TikTok for breaching data protection rules for minors, the latest in a series of sanctions against technology giants.
Chinese-owned TikTok Technology Limited will have to pay “administrative fines totaling 345 million euros” (about $368 million) and adjust its operations to comply with the rules within three months, the Protection Commission announced. of Irish Data (CPD) in a statement replicated by the AFP news agency.
This Irish regulatory body – which has a central role in ensuring compliance with EU rules – opened an investigation in September 2021 about the practices of this social network, a subsidiary of the Chinese giant ByteDance.
TikTok has 134 million users in the EU and this investigation includes practices between July 31 and December 31, 2020. The regulator explained that the registration of minors under 18 years of age on the social network was done in a way that defined By default the accounts are public.
Another problem detected by the organization is that A TikTok feature called “family connection,” which allows a teen’s account to be linked to their parent’s, did not include proper parentage verification.
The regulatory authority analyzed the social network’s verification steps to prevent the registration of minors under 13 years of age and did not find any violations, but noted that the platform does not adequately evaluate the risks faced by children.
The facade of the headquarters of ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. / Photo: AFP.
TikTok said it “respectfully” disagrees with the fine and is “evaluating” how to proceed.
“The CPD’s criticism focuses on functions and settings that were in effect three years ago, and that we changed even long before the investigation began, such as setting all accounts of minors under 16 years of age to be private by default,” he said. a TikTok spokesperson.
The platform stressed that it carefully monitors the age of its users and that it takes the necessary measures and specified that it deleted almost 17 million accounts worldwide in the first three months of this year due to suspicions that the users were under 13 years old. .
TikTok announced in early September that it had begun hosting the data of its European users in Ireland.
Earlier this month, the social media giant opened a long-promised data center in Ireland, as it had promised in a bid to allay privacy fears.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) adopted by the EU in 2018 is the toughest law on technology and ensures that citizens give consent to the ways in which their data is used.
In May, the CPD had imposed a record fine of 1.2 billion euros on Meta (almost $1.3 billion) for transferring user data from the EU to the United States.
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