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 youngsters’s private data.

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

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

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

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

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

Along with the probe into TikTok, the ICO can also 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 kids’s code.

The code is about to design rules for on-line platforms geared toward defending kids within the UK. Platforms which accumulate UK kids’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 concentrate on how the platforms examine the ages of their customers and their enforcement of age checks.

Ofcom mentioned 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 individuals a month. Nonetheless, it doesn’t state through which international locations their customers are based mostly, so there isn’t a determine for the variety of individuals utilizing it within the UK.

“I do not wish to pre-judge how we’d take 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 variety of various applied sciences and methods which might be out there, I might say, and the diploma of rigor, I believe, relies upon partly upon the sorts of dangers, the chance that kids will probably be accessing these websites.

“I assume a baseline can be: self-declaration might be not going to chop it if there’s content material on the positioning or companies on the positioning which might be unsuitable for kids below 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 adjustments this 12 months that deal with 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 firms that are discovered to have achieved so could be punished with enforcement notices and fines.

“We’re patrolling, and there will probably be penalties for breaches of the regulation,” mentioned 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.