The United Kingdom had banned the TikTok application to its civil servants three weeks ago for security reasons. The social network is now sanctioned by the British Data Protection Agency for having collected the personal information of children.
With our correspondent in London, Marie Boeda
Around 1.4 million UK children under 13 opened a TikTok account in 2020, despite the company banning it.
This means that there was no parental consent, and that information about these young users was recorded and analyzed in order to offer them new content, sometimes inappropriate for minors.
It’s a breach of data protection law, the UK Information Commissioner said. According to the agency in charge of the investigation, the mobile video-sharing application did not conduct any ” adequate checks to identify and cancel the accounts of these children “.
TikTok claims to have changed its rules since, and can still appeal this fine. Four years ago, the social network was sentenced to more than 5 million euros by the United States for the same reasons.
Amounts which could well be painless in the face of the income earned by the parent company of the platform, which amounted to 73 billion euros last year.
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