The information commissioner's office of the United Kingdom recently fined Tiktok $29 million, having provisionally discovered that Tiktok had breached the laws of child data protection for two years.
The privacy regulatory body of the United Kingdom reported the exploitation of protection laws of the country’s data. There was an investigation that concluded that TikTok may have breached the laws of data protection from May 2018 to July 2020.
The fine is determined by the calculation of 4% of TikTok’s annual turnover globally. The ICO issued TikTok with a “notice of intent” with a fine of up to $27 million, which is considered the highest in ICO’s history as the largest amount paid till now is $20 million to British Airways.
The Information Commissioner's office has pointed out in regard to Tiktok that it may breach privacy by processing data of minors under 13 years old without parental consent, failing to provide complete information to users "in a concise, transparent, and easily understandable manner" and processing unsuitable "special category" data without legal authority.
The ICO defines “special category data” as any use of sensitive personal data including sexual orientation, religious beliefs, culture and nationality, political perspective, and biometric data.
The information commissioner, John Edwards commented on TikTok’s failure in fulfilling its legal duties of protecting the privacy of data of its young users. He stated, "we all want children to be able to learn and experience the digital world, but with proper data privacy protection.”
In John’s opinion, digital learning is essential for children, but the companies offering the digital services should be legally responsible for ensuring that reasonable protection measures are incorporated into these services, as during the investigation of TikTok it was found to be provisionally lacking in these measures.
ICO added to its statement that the findings from the investigation are provisional and no final conclusions can be drawn at this time.
A spokesperson from Tiktok in a conversation with TechCrunch shared that they do respect the concerns expressed by the ICO about security and protection laws, but that they disagree with the ICO's views regarding Tiktok's privacy policies.
