TikTok Fined £12.7m for Processing Children's Data

On Tuesday, Britain's Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) issued a £12.7 million fine against TikTok for using the personal data of children under 13 without parental consent. The ICO estimated that in 2020, TikTok allowed up to 1.4 million UK children under 13 to access its platform, despite supposedly enforcing a minimum age of 13 for creating an account.

“There are laws in place to make sure our children are as safe in the digital world as they are in the physical world,” the U.K.’s Information Commissioner John Edwards said. “TikTok did not abide by those laws.” As reported by the Guardian UK, the announcement of the hefty fine comes weeks after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was called “naive for assuming TikTok could ever regulate itself” and criticized for not acting on the privacy concerns raised by security experts over TikTok.

It is worth noting that the final amount of the penalty, which is £12.7 million, is lower than the ICO's original notice of intent in September 2022, which was to levy a fine of £27 million. However, the regulator decided to forego the provisional finding related to the unlawful use of special category data (personal information such as race, gender, political beliefs, etc) after considering TikTok's representations. As a result, this potential violation was not included in the final amount of the fine.

When contacted for a response, the official TikTok spokesperson stated that “While we disagree with the ICO’s decision, which relates to May 2018 to July 2020, we are pleased that the fine announced today has been reduced to under half the amount proposed last year. We will continue to review the decision and are considering next steps.”

However, the £12.7 million fine imposed on TikTok is insignificant compared to the reported $80 billion (£64 billion) revenue generated by ByteDance in 2022.

TikTok has already been banned on government devices in the UK, and potentially faces further problems in the country with the upcoming passage of the Online Safety Bill.The platform is also under global scrutiny, with many Western nations taking measures against TikTok out of fear that user data may be shared with the Chinese government.