By Michael Susin
Irish authorities have fined TikTok 345 million euros ($367.2 million) for breaching the country’s data protection laws, including the misuse of children’s information.
The Irish Data Protection Commission said on Friday that the social platform violated children’s data protection after finding that settings for accounts of child users were set to public by default, meaning that anyone–on or off Tiktok–could see their content.
The commission also found that the “family pairing” feature–which allows adults to pair their accounts to a child user account and provides access to direct messages–didn’t verify parent or guardian status, it said.
Other findings were related to lack of transparent information and patterns to mislead users to choose for more privacy-intrusive options when registering or posting videos.
Along with the fine, the commission ordered TikTok, a division of Chinese tech giant ByteDance, to bring its processing into compliance with its rules.
Write to Michael Susin at [email protected]
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