$5.4 million fined on TikTok

TikTok UK and TikTok Ireland have been fined €5,000,000 (Around $5.4 Million) by France’s data protection regulator (CNIL). The fine is for making it impossible for platform users to reject cookies and for failing to adequately explain their function.

“Users of ‘tiktok[.]com’ could not refuse cookies as easily as accepting them. They were not informed in a sufficiently precise way of the objectives of the different cookies,”

“Making the opt-out mechanism more complex is in fact discouraging users from refusing cookies and encouraging them to prefer the ease of the ‘Accept All’ button,”  the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL) said in a statement calling it a breach of the French Data Protection Act.

Article 82 of France’s data protection regulations (DPA), a national statute that complies with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) framework implemented throughout Europe, was found to be broken by this design behavior.

In addition to requiring services to obtain users’ consent for the storage of cookies, Article 82 of France’s DPA also assumes the users’ freedom to do so. Because of this, the cookie consent dialogs must give the options to the user in a balanced manner, which wasn’t the case on TikTok sites.

The seriousness of the infractions, including the number of people affected, including children, and the quantity of times CNIL had to remind TikTok that it needed to abide by France’s Data Protection Act, led to the €5 million penalties.

Source

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/tiktok-slapped-with-54-million-fine-over-cookie-opt-out-feature/

https://thehackernews.com/2023/01/tiktok-fined-54-million-by-french.html

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