TikTok is under fire by the European Union for targeting minors. The EU has some of the stringent laws against tech companies, limiting how much targeting and data harvesting they are allowed to conduct.
TikTok is particularly popular with teens and young people, due to its innovative video and scroll format. The company is owned by a parent Chinese corporation, whose data collection has already been under fire. The Hill reports:
The European Commission opened a formal investigation to review whether the social media app TikTok violated new rules in place that aim to protect minors online, it announced Monday.
The investigation will review if TikTok, owned by the Chinese-based parent company ByteDance, breached the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s new online children protection rule that went into effect Saturday, by its platform design and privacy settings.
TikTok’s data collection is quite deep, crossing over to other apps to build complete profiles. Its close relationship to the Chinese Communist Party makes it particularly dangerous, as it could send the data there if requested.CNN says:
Social media companies operating in the EU are bound by obligations set out in the Digital Services Act, enacted in August, which places stricter requirements on large tech companies — defined as those with more than 45 million monthly users in the bloc — and seeks to protect people’s rights online. TikTok has almost 136 million monthly active users in the EU, according to the European Commission.
Companies found to have flouted the rules can be fined the equivalent of up to 6% of their annual global revenue.
Other social media companies like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, as well as X and Snapchat, could all be subject to more scrutiny. Apple already escaped its iMessage investigation, due to rolling out Rich Communication Services soon.
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