Irish regulators have fined TikTok €345m (£296m) for violating children's privacy.
The complaint concerned how the social media app handled children's data in 2020 - particularly around age verification and privacy settings.
It is the biggest fine to date TikTok has received from regulators.
The Chinese-owned short-video platform, which has grown rapidly among teenagers around the world in recent years, breached a number of EU privacy laws between July 31, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2020, Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) said in a statement.
The European Consumer Organisation alerted authorities after an investigation that
“TikTok was responsible for multiple breaches of the EU’s consumer and data protection rules”. “We now hope this decision triggers change at the company to address issues which not only concern minors, but also adults,”
said Ursula Pachl, the consumer group’s deputy director-general.
TikTok, which has 134mn monthly EU users, failed to provide child users with enough transparency over what was happening to their data and nudged them towards more privacy-intrusive options, said Dublin-based DPC.
TikTok does not say how many of its users are children.
This is TikTok’s largest ding from regulators to date, but it’s not the first time the social media giant has been punished for children’s privacy and safety missteps; earlier this year, Britain’s data watchdog issued TikTok a €12.7 million fine (almost $16 million) for breaking British data protection laws in its processing of kids’ information. In 2021, Dutch authorities issued a €750,000 fine (almost $1 million) for similar violations. And back in 2019, the Federal Trade Commission reached a $5.7 million settlement with TikTok (then Musical.ly) along the same lines. (Still, ByteDance posted $80 billion in revenue in 2022.)