TikTok investigated by UK watchdog over use of children’s data

The UK knowledge watchdog has launched what it calls a “main investigation” into TikTok’s use of kids’s private data.

The Data Commissioner’s Workplace (ICO) will examine the best way through which the social media platform makes use of the information of 13 to 17-year-olds to advocate additional content material to them.

John Edwards, the Data Commissioner, stated it might have a look at whether or not TikTok’s knowledge assortment practices might result in youngsters experiencing harms, akin to knowledge being leaked or spending “extra time than is wholesome” on the platform.

TikTok instructed the BBC its recommender programs operated beneath “strict and complete measures that defend the privateness and security of teenagers”.

It added that the platform additionally has “sturdy restrictions on the content material allowed in teenagers’ feeds”.

Mr Edwards stated TikTok’s algorithm “feeds” on private knowledge gleaned from person profiles, preferences, hyperlinks clicked and the way lengthy they spend watching a specific video – making it topic to UK guidelines.

Along with the probe into TikTok, the ICO can be checking the age verification processes of Reddit and Imgur, an image-sharing platform.

The investigation will look into whether or not the businesses are complying with each the UK’s knowledge safety legal guidelines, and the youngsters’s code.

The code is ready to design ideas for on-line platforms aimed toward defending youngsters within the UK. Platforms which gather UK youngsters’s person knowledge should minimise the quantity they collect and take additional care when processing it.

The ICO’s investigations into Reddit and Imgur will give attention to how the platforms examine the ages of their customers and their enforcement of age checks.

Ofcom stated in October Reddit had overtaken X because the UK’s fifth hottest platform.

Imgur, in the meantime, says on its web site that it reaches greater than 250 million folks a month. Nonetheless, it doesn’t state through which international locations their customers are based mostly, so there is no such thing as a determine for the variety of folks utilizing it within the UK.

“I do not wish to pre-judge how we would have a look at the Imgur and Reddit issues, but when there are age limits for accessing companies, then the platforms should implement these in some methods,” the Data Commissioner instructed the BBC.

“There are a selection of various applied sciences and strategies which are obtainable, I might say, and the diploma of rigor, I feel, relies upon partly upon the sorts of dangers, the probability that youngsters can be accessing these websites.

“I suppose a baseline could be: self-declaration might be not going to chop it if there may be content material on the location or companies on the location which are unsuitable for youngsters beneath the age of 13.”

A Reddit spokesperson instructed the BBC that 95% of their customers are adults however that they “have plans to roll out modifications this yr that handle updates to UK laws round age assurance”.

Imgur has not responded to the BBC’s request for a remark.

The investigations don’t essentially imply any of the three platforms have damaged the regulation.

However corporations that are discovered to have carried out so may be punished with enforcement notices and fines.

“We’re patrolling, and there can be penalties for breaches of the regulation,” stated Mr Edwards.

It isn’t the primary time TikTok has confronted scrutiny from the ICO. The platform is interesting towards an ICO fine of £12.7m in 2023 for misusing children’s data issued in 2023.