Kenneth Glad
The digital world moves fast. Keeping track of who is actually behind a screen remains a constant challenge. For years, government officials have chased down tech giants, and now, a major legal battle over young users has quietly reached its end.
TikTok has chosen to pay a £12.7 million fine to the UK data watchdog. According to The Guardian, the social media giant formally dropped a lengthy legal appeal against the Information Commissioner’s Office.
The original penalty landed in 2023. Regulators ruled the business failed to stop children under 13 from creating new profiles. In 2020 alone, up to 1.75 million British kids below the minimum age were actively swiping through videos.
According to the ICO, the company ignored vital parental consent rules completely. They also failed to explain how user data was gathered.
Not doing enough
When officials first issued the fine, they claimed the video app had done “very little, if anything” to fix the problem. John Edwards was the information commissioner at the time.
“Our findings were that TikTok were not doing enough to prevent under-13s accessing their platform, they were not doing enough when they became aware of under-13s to get rid of them, and they were not doing enough to detect under-13s on there,” he told the newspaper.
Today, current regulators feel completely vindicated. Emily Keaney serves as a deputy commissioner for the powerful watchdog.
“Our successful action against TikTok shows how important it is for companies to have the right protections in place, including to prevent access by children who are not old enough to be using their services,” Keaney said to The Guardian.
Changing the rules
For its part, TikTok maintains it strongly disagreed with the initial ruling. A spokesperson noted the penalty only covered a historical window between 2018 and 2020.
Since then, the Chinese-owned platform claims to have rolled out “many youth safety measures and policies” to protect its 30 million UK users. The company also abandoned a fight over its secret algorithm.
Investigators will now examine how the app handles teenage data and harmful content.
Next year, the UK government will enforce a strict under-16 age limit for all social media access. The national communications regulator, Ofcom, warned that “more action from the tech industry is needed” before the ban begins.
Sources: The Guardian
