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 way in which by 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, stated it will have a look at whether or not TikTok’s information assortment practices might result in youngsters experiencing harms, equivalent to information being leaked or spending “extra time than is wholesome” on the platform.

TikTok advised the BBC its recommender programs 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 information 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 information safety legal guidelines, and the youngsters’s code.

The code is ready to design ideas for on-line platforms aimed 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 test 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. Nonetheless, it doesn’t state by which international locations their customers are primarily based, so there is no such thing as a determine for the variety of folks utilizing it within the UK.

“I do not wish to pre-judge how we’d 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 advised the BBC.

“There are a variety of various applied sciences and methods which might be obtainable, I’d say, and the diploma of rigor, I feel, relies upon partially upon the sorts of dangers, the probability that youngsters can be accessing these websites.

“I suppose a baseline could 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 might be unsuitable for youngsters underneath the age of 13.”

A Reddit spokesperson advised 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 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 firms that are discovered to have completed so could be punished with enforcement notices and fines.

“We’re patrolling, and there can be penalties for breaches of the regulation,” stated Mr Edwards.

It’s not the primary time TikTok has confronted scrutiny from the ICO. The platform is interesting towards an ICO nice of £12.7m in 2023 for misusing youngsters’s information issued in 2023.