TikTok loses court battle over £12.7m child privacy fine
TikTok has lost an appeal against a £12.7m fine from the UK’s data protection regulator for illegally processing the data of over 1.4m children under the age of 13.
The watchdog hit TikTok with the penalty in April 2023 for breaching the UK’s data protection law, the GDPR, for unlawfully processing the data of children under 13 years old from May 2018 to June 2020. The Upper Tribunal ruled in favour of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on Wednesday.
This follows an investigation by the ICO which found the video-sharing platform had used the children’s data to track and profile them and potentially present them with harmful or inappropriate algorithmic content without obtaining parental consent, which the GDPR requires for under 13-year-olds.
TikTok appealed against the fine, claiming it had processed the data in accordance with the law on the basis of “special purposes” where the GDPR allows processing under 13 year olds’ data if it is for journalistic, academic, artistic, or literary purposes.
The tech giant argued the videos users generated and shared using the platform’s creation and editing tools were a form of artistic expression.
The court, however, rejected the tech giant’s argument, and said TikTok’s claim for processing children’s data in line with special purposes is “not sufficient” and it had no way of proving whether the content was used for artistic purposes or not.
“In this case are underage children seeking access to the site, and the ‘innocent party’ is a commercial entity which has made the operational and commercial choice not to require corroboration of users’ warranted age with the consequence that large numbers of underage children accessed the platform during the relevant period,” the court said.
Ruling ‘likely to be relevant’ to other platforms
Joanna Ludlam, partner at Jenner and Block said the ruling “is likely to be relevant to other platforms advancing similar arguments” and “lands at a moment when regulators are under real pressure to act quickly on children’s data, with the Online Safety Act regime now sitting alongside data protection law.”
The ICO’s general counsel, Binnie Goh, said the Upper Tribunal’s decision “sets an important precedent for the application of the special purposes provisions in data protection law.”
“We remain committed to ensuring that organisations, particularly those providing online services to children, comply with their data protection obligations,” Goh said.
A TikTok spokesperson said the company is “carefully considering this judgment.”