It is reported that TikTok (Tik Tok International Edition) is facing a fine of up to 345 million euros from the Irish regulatory authorities for failing to protect children’s privacy.
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced that TikTok was fined 345 million euros (about 2.679 billion yuan). DPC claimed that TikTok violated the EU General Data Protection Regulation in protecting children’s data.
According to DPC’s survey, TikTok violated many rules of the European Union: the personal data of children’s users are made public by default, which means that anyone who is not on TikTok can view the content posted by these users, which brings many risks to children under 13; The “family pairing” setting allows non-child accounts to be paired with child accounts, but TikTok cannot verify whether non-child users are parents or guardians of children; TikTok does not provide enough transparency information to children users; TikTok adopts “dark mode” in privacy settings, that is, it guides users to choose more public privacy options when registering and publishing videos.
The Committee gave TikTok three months. In addition to paying the fine, TikTok needs to take action within three months to meet the compliance requirements.
Subsequently, TikTok issued a statement, raising objections to the EU’s decision, especially expressing dissatisfaction with the amount of fines. The statement pointed out that the European Commission’s criticism mainly focused on the functions and settings three years ago, but the company had modified some settings before the investigation began, such as setting all accounts of users under 16 as private accounts by default.
Anu Talus, president of the European Data Protection Agency, which is made up of EU agencies, said: “Social media companies have a responsibility to ensure that users, especially children, are not provided with options in an unfair way. This responsibility is especially important when guiding users to make decisions that are contrary to personal privacy in some way. ”
It is worth noting that at the beginning of this month, the European Union published a list of 22 regulated technology services according to the Digital Services Law, including TikTok, which has more than 1 billion users worldwide. These technology companies are required to abide by the strict new market regulations formulated by the European Union in the next six months.
Post time: Sep-19-2023