The Chinese-owned video-sharing app “Tiktok” has been fined by the UK government via the UK’s data regulator a whopping sum of £12.7 million for multiple breaches of British child protection policy.
In a briefing by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), it was gathered that Tiktok did not do enough to police age restrictions on its platform. According to John Edwards who is the Information Commissioner, “it is estimated that one million under 13s were inappropriately granted access to the platform despite laws put in place to prevent children from digital harm”.
Mr. John Edwards went on to make it clear that “There are laws in place to make sure our children are as safe in the digital world as they are in the physical world” which Tiktok has not followed or abide by those laws.
The essence of this laws is to keep children in the UK and around the world safe, if the law are not followed then the possibility of children’s data being use without their consent is very likely. This data could be use to track them, and profile them, potentially delivering harmful, inappropriate content at their very next scroll.
Therefore this fine “reflects the serious impact their “TikTok’s” failures may have had. They did not do enough to check who was using their platform or take sufficient action to remove the underage children that were using their platform”.
However, Tiktok in its defence, stated that its platform for users aged 13 and over. Tiktok have invest heavily to help keep under-13s off the platform and our 40,000-strong safety team works around the clock to help keep the platform safe for our community.
Tiktok totally disagree with the UK’s ICO decision and also related the current issue to the fact that they had a case with the UK government dated May 2018 to July 2020, where the fine imposed on them was much higher. Tiktok is grateful that this has been reduced to under half the previous proposed amount last year.
It is believe that the present heat on Tiktok is as a result of pressure from the Western nations. US, UK and other countries have placed a band on the use of Tiktok on government-owned device as a measure to protect their data.