Tiktok: Why TikTok has been asked to pay $368 million fine

Data Protection Commission ,DPC) Ireland has been fined 345 million euros (about $367 million) TIC Toc For misuse of children’s data.
In 2021, an investigation was launched to evaluate TikTok’s compliance with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws. The Irish data watchdog, which oversees the app across the EU, has found that TikTok has committed a number of crimes gdpr Violation.
Irish Data Protection Commission Found that TikTok did not properly consider the risks by making children’s accounts public by default, allowing adults to send direct messages to people over the age of 16, and allowing children under 13 on the platform. By doing this, we have violated the GDPR.
The findings show that children aged 13 to 17 were led through the sign-up process in such a way that their accounts became public by default. This means that anyone can view or comment on the account’s content.
moreover, “family couple” The feature, which allows an adult to manage a child’s account settings, does not verify whether the adult was actually the parent or guardian of the child user. TikTok’s “Family Pairing” is a way to manage app settings. The DPC found that unverified adult profiles could be linked, allowing direct messages to be sent.
DPC has expressed concern on both these issues.

TikTok’s efforts to keep children under 13 years of age away from the platform are under question. Although age verification methods were GDPR compliant, the privacy of underage users was inadequately protected.
The DPC criticized their previous default public-setting process, which allowed anyone to view content from underage users. Features like Couple And Stitch was automatically enabled for users under 17. TikTok has three months to comply with the new rules. No violations of the GDPR were found in the methods used to verify user age.
Previous fine on TikTok
TikTok was fined GBP 12.7 million by the UK data regulator in April for illegally processing the data of 1.4 million children under 13 who used its platform without parental consent .
“We respectfully disagree with the decision, particularly the level of the fine imposed. The DPC’s criticism focuses on features and settings that were in place three years ago, and that we had made changes to before the investigation began, such as setting all under-16 accounts to private by default,” TikTok said. Said
Since 2021, all existing and new TikTok accounts for 13 to 15-year-olds have been set to private by default, meaning only people approved by the user can view their content. These changes were made to address problems revealed in the inquiry.