Ofcom fines TikTok £1.8m for inaccurate safety data
July 24, 2024
Ofcom has fined TikTok £1.875 million (€2.1m) for failing to accurately respond to a formal request for information about its parental controls safety feature.
Ofcom explains that it sought information from video-sharing platforms under regulations that pre-date the UK’s Online Safety Act, to inform a planned report highlighting the safety measures they have in place to protect children from harmful content.
As part of this process, Ofcom asked TikTok to provide data on take-up of its parental controls feature, ‘Family Pairing’, to assess its effectiveness in protecting teenage users and to help inform and empower parents to make decisions for a Child Safety Report about which platforms they and their children use.
TikTok responded to the information request on September 4th 2023. On December 1st 2023, TikTok highlighted that the data it had provided was not accurate and that it was conducting an internal investigation to understand the root cause of its inaccuracies.
Given this disclosure, Ofcom launched an investigation on December 14th 2023 into whether the company had failed to comply with its duties to respond to a statutory demand for information.
The investigation uncovered a number of failings in TikTok’s data governance processes. Not only did the company have insufficient checks in place leading to an inaccurate data submission to Ofcom in the first place, but TikTok was also deemed slow in bringing the error to Ofcom’s attention or to remedy the issue. This delay meant that Ofcom was forced to remove details of the effectiveness of TikTok’s parental controls from the report.
TikTok ultimately provided accurate, albeit partial, data to Ofcom’s request for information on March 28th 2024 – more than seven months after the original deadline. The investigation concluded that TikTok failed to fully cooperate with Ofcom’s statutory request for information and its work in producing the Child Safety Report. As such, the company contravened its duties under s368Z10 and s368Y of the Communications Act 2003.
As a result of these failings, Ofcom has fined TikTok £1.875 million, which will be passed on to HM Treasury.
The penalty includes a 25 per cent reduction from the penalty Ofcom would otherwise have imposed, as a result of TikTok accepting the findings and settling the case.
“Ofcom’s job is to scrutinise platforms’ safety features, and gathering information is a critical part of holding tech firms to account. When we demand data, it must be accurate and submitted on time. We won’t hesitate to take enforcement action if any company fails to do this,” commented Suzanne Cater, Ofcom’s Enforcement Director.
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