TikTok could face a £27 million fine after an ICO investigation found that the company may have breached UK data protection law, failing to protect children’s privacy when using the TikTok platform. The ICO has issued TikTok Inc and TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited with a ‘notice of intent’ - a legal document that precedes a potential fine.
The notice sets out the ICO’s provisional view that TikTok breached UK data protection law between May 2018 and July 2020. The ICO investigation found the company may have:
- processed the data of children under the age of 13 without appropriate parental consent,
- failed to provide proper information to its users in a concise, transparent and easily understood way, and
- processed special category data, without legal grounds to do so.