TikTok has been fined 345 million euros for breaching privacy laws regarding the processing of children's personal data in the European Union.
Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner says the Chinese-owned short-video platform breached a number of EU privacy laws between July 31, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2020.
The DPC says TikTok's breaches included how in 2020 accounts for users under the age of 16 were set to "public" by default and that TikTok did not verify whether a user was actually a child user's parent or guardian when linked through the "family pairing" feature.
TikTok says it plans to further update its privacy materials to make the differences between public and private accounts clearer and that a private account will be pre-selected for new 16-17-year-old users when they register for the app from later this month.
The DPC gave TikTok three months to bring all its processing into compliance where infringements were found.