TikTok investigated by UK watchdog over use of youngsters’s knowledge

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

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 suggest additional content material to them.

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

TikTok informed the BBC its recommender techniques operated underneath “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 stated TikTok’s algorithm “feeds” on private knowledge gleaned from consumer 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 youngsters’s code.

The code is ready to design rules for on-line platforms aimed toward defending youngsters within the UK. Platforms which accumulate UK youngsters’s consumer knowledge should minimise the quantity they collect and take further 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 individuals a month. Nevertheless, 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 individuals utilizing it within the UK.

“I do not need 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 need to implement these in some methods,” the Data Commissioner informed the BBC.

“There are a variety of various applied sciences and methods which are out there, I’d say, and the diploma of rigor, I believe, relies upon partly upon the sorts of dangers, the chance that youngsters will probably be accessing these websites.

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

A Reddit spokesperson informed the BBC that 95% of their customers are adults however that they “have plans to roll out adjustments this yr that deal with updates to UK rules 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 executed so will be punished with enforcement notices and fines.

“We’re patrolling, and there will probably 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 high quality of £12.7m in 2023 for misusing youngsters’s knowledge issued in 2023.