TikTok has been fined €345-million euros (R7-billion) for breaching privacy laws regarding the processing of children’s personal data in the EU, its lead regulator in the bloc said on Friday.

The Chinese-owned short-video platform, which has grown rapidly among teenagers around the world in recent years, breached a number of EU privacy laws between 31 July and 31 December 2020, Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) said in a statement.

It is the first time the ByteDance-owned app has been reprimanded by the DPC, the lead regulator in the EU for many of the world’s top tech firms due to the location of their regional headquarters in Ireland.

A spokesman for ByteDance said it disagreed with the decision, particularly the size of the fine, and that most of the criticisms are no longer relevant as a result of measures it introduced before the DPC’s probe began in September 2021.

The DPC said TikTok’s breaches included how in 2020 accounts for users under the age of 16 were set to “public” by default and that TikTok did not verify whether a user was actually a child user’s parent or guardian when linked through the “family pairing” feature.

TikTok added tougher parental controls to family pairing in November 2020 and changed the default setting for all registered users under the age of 16 to “private” in January 2021.

TikTok said on Friday it plans to further update its privacy materials to make the differences between public and private accounts clearer and that a private account will be pre-selected for new 16-17-year-old users when they register for the app from later this month.

Second TikTok probe

The DPC gave TikTok three months to bring all its processing into compliance where infringements were found.

It has a second probe open into the transferring by TikTok of personal data to China and whether it complies with EU data law when moving personal data to countries outside the bloc. In March, the DPC said it was preparing a preliminary draft decision into that investigation.

Under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, introduced in 2018, the lead regulator for any given company can impose fines of up to 4% of the company’s global revenue.