Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced that the agency is fining TikTok with $367 million due to the company's way of handling data from children.
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Ireland Investigates TikTok
In 2021, DPC announced that an investigation will run against TikTok. The commission investigated if the social media giant was in compliance with Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws. In August, the decision was finalized before the formal announcement.
Upon investigation, DPC noted that TikTok was setting children's accounts as public by default. This implied that kids have access to other features that are not appropriate for them. Moreover, the videos posted by the children are also viewable to the public by default.
In 2021, TikTok updated its privacy settings for minors. However, the tightened security only applied to 13 up to 15 years. The new setting allowed the age group to private their account by default.
DPC Fines Social Media Platforms
TikTok is only one among other platforms that was fined by the commission after failing to comply with the regulations. In 2022, Meta was fined with over $400 million after allowing teen Instagram users to create business profiles.
Although TikTok has been putting some efforts to protect children's privacy, these efforts still seem lacking. TikTok also launched its Family Pairing feature but the implementation is still questionable for DPC.
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