TikTok investigated by UK watchdog over use of kids’s information

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

The Data Commissioner’s Workplace (ICO) will examine the best way by 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 take a look at whether or not TikTok’s information assortment practices may result in youngsters experiencing harms, comparable to information being leaked or spending “extra time than is wholesome” on the platform.

TikTok informed the RAYNAE its recommender techniques 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 stated TikTok’s algorithm “feeds” on private information 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 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 information safety legal guidelines, and the kids’s code.

The code is about to design rules for on-line platforms geared toward defending youngsters within the UK. Platforms which gather UK youngsters’s person information 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. Nevertheless, it doesn’t state by which international locations their customers are based mostly, so there isn’t any determine for the variety of folks utilizing it within the UK.

“I do not need to pre-judge how we’d take a look at the Imgur and Reddit issues, but when there are age limits for accessing providers, then the platforms need to implement these in some methods,” the Data Commissioner informed the RAYNAE.

“There are a selection of various applied sciences and methods which are accessible, I’d say, and the diploma of rigor, I feel, relies upon partly upon the sorts of dangers, the chance that youngsters might be accessing these websites.

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

A Reddit spokesperson informed the RAYNAE that 95% of their customers are adults however that they “have plans to roll out modifications this 12 months that tackle updates to UK rules round age assurance”.

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

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

However firms that are discovered to have performed so might be punished with enforcement notices and fines.

“We’re patrolling, and there might be penalties for breaches of the legislation,” 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 information issued in 2023.