More challenges for TikTok, with the short-form video app fined £12,700,000 ($US15.9 million) in the UK for letting underage children access and use the app.

According to the UK Information Commissioner:

"ICO has imposed a £12,700,000 fine on TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited and TikTok Inc (TikTok) for a series of data protection law breaches, including failing to process children's personal data lawfully. The ICO believes that in 2020, TikTok permitted as many as 1.4 million UK children under 13 to use its service, even though the company's own rules did not allow children that age to open an account."

The fine is the first big issuance under new British regulations designed to protect minors on the internet. British regulators had informed TikTok in September last year of its investigation, at which time the app was also asked to enhance its processes to remain compliant with the new updates. At that time, according to reports, the fine is around £27 million.

Today, it issued a very public fine to bring closure to its investigation. ICO plans to set an example from this case.

This is indeed a pretty stiff fine as compared to the penalty they had to pay when this offense was committed in the United States.

Back in 2019, TikTok was fined $US5.7 million for collecting data on underage Americans who accessed the platform without their parents' consent. It has since put new rules into place requiring verification for every user, meaning all under the age of 13 will be re-directed to a separate, more limited in-app experience, restricting access and comments on clips they publish as well as access to their DMs.

Although, apparently, that has not deterred many of the young from joining the application.

TikTok has added more tools and detection processes since then to help prevent this aspect, but breaches that occurred in the past are still punishable, and therefore, TikTok still has to pay for the latest fine.

This is a critical area of concern because the app has grown so popular among younger crowds.

According to internal data published by The New York Times in 2020, around a third of TikTok's user base is 14 years old or under. Even though that may have changed since then, it certainly outlines the scope of the problem on this front.
Of all these, the app had already been on the other end of many investigations and even bans in some states due to the content generated from this aspect. Concurrently, there have been criticisms against TikTok that it encourages viral dangerous activities from which some minor users resulted in death as they seek to perform those dangerous endeavors since they saw them on their application.

Given the scale of the potential problem, and the risk of exposure in the app, the enforcement actions make sense. And while TikTok is working to improve its systems, there needs to be a level of significance placed on this element, to ensure greater compliance in the future.

TikTok will now have 28 days to appeal the penalty.