TikTok owner made $80B last year, probably not squirming over £12.7m fine for collecting children's data
ByteDance was as big as supermassive technology giant and game publisher Tencent in 2022. The privately owned company says it raked in $80 billion over the course of last year(opens in new tab), up from the $60B bucks it took home in 2021. Though it's not all rosy, at least for some of the app's users, as ByteDance also took home a fine from the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for misusing children's data.
The fine from the ICO(opens in new tab) was for using personal data belonging to children using the app without their parent's consent between May 2018 and July 2020 (via The Guardian(opens in new tab)). It amounts to a paltry sum (to a company like ByteDance) of £12.7M.
Now, TikTok says in its Terms of Service(opens in new tab) that no one under the age of 13 may use the video sharing app. It says, «We monitor for underage use and we will terminate your account if we reasonably suspect that you are underage.»
That wasn't enough for the ICO, however. It estimates up to 1.4 million children under 13 in the UK used the platform in 2020, and that TikTok failed to adequately check for the lot of them.
«As a consequence, an estimated one million under 13s were inappropriately granted access to the platform, with TikTok collecting and using their personal data,» John Edwards, UK information commissioner, says. «That means that their data may have been used to track them and profile them, potentially delivering harmful, inappropriate content at their very next scroll.»
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