TikTok fined R$790 million for failure to respect the privacy of minors

tiktok was fined 345 million euros (about R$ 790 million in direct conversion) in the European Union for failing to ensure the security of children’s data. The platform was accused of breaching the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) this Friday (15).

This is a result of an investigation announced in 2021 into TikTok’s adherence to the GDPR, a set of European Union data protection laws. The analysis focused on TikTok features such as default account settings, “Family Sync” setting, and age verification.

Ireland’s regulator found that: TikTok is setting kids’ accounts to public by defaultThey make the content they produce available to everyone.

Problem with parental controls

Family Sync is a TikTok feature that allows a child to link their account to the account of a responsible adult who will have control over screen time, message restrictions, and other functions.

However, the DPC discovered that the child’s account could be linked to any adult profile without verifying the parental link. Once connected, this “responsible” profile can remove all restrictions on the child, even for direct messages.

Another deficiency of TikTok may be in age verificationIt is not enough to guarantee that the user is over 13 years of age to create an account.

TikTok needs to be stricter

TikTok announced measures that will make user accounts between the ages of 13 and 15 more private on the platform in 2021.

In addition to limiting the visibility of content to friends only, the measure will prevent those users’ videos from receiving unwanted interactions. Now, The platform has up to three months to implement these rules.