Social media platform TikTok was fined $370 million by the European Union after the platform failed to protect children’s privacy.
Data Protection Commissioner for Ireland Helen Dixon said an investigation into TikTok found that accounts belonging to 13–17-year-olds were automatically made public upon creation, violating the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law.
“That is precisely at the hands of TikTok because of the way they designed the platform, and we say that infringed the data protection by design and by the default requirements of the GDPR,” Dixon told BBC News.
A spokesman for TikTok offered a response to the matter, saying, “The criticisms are focused on features and settings that were in place three years ago, and that we made changes to well before the investigation even began, such as setting all under 16 accounts to private by default.”
In 2019, TikTok, then Musical.ly, agreed to pay $5.7 million for violating U.S. rules for data and privacy protection.
British regulators also fined TikTok $15.8 million for allowing children under the age of 13 to open an account.
Reporting from The Daily Wire:
TikTok has faced waves of criticism from city, state, and federal government officials in the U.S. and governments around the world that are concerned about the Chinese-owned app’s privacy settings. More than two-thirds of U.S. states have banned the social media platform from being downloaded on government devices. India completely banned the app in 2020, and other countries such as the U.K., Canada, Australia, France, and New Zealand have banned the app from government devices
