TikTok slapped with R91-million fine

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A €5 million (R91 million) fine has been levied against TikTok UK and TikTok Ireland for making it difficult for users to reject cookies and failing to adequately disclose their function.

TikTok was found to have violated Article 82 of France’s data protection rules, according to the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL), which oversees data protection in France.

While TikTok UK and TikTok Ireland provided users with an easy prompt and option to accept all cookies immediately, rejecting them was not as simple and took a number of clicks, according to the CNIL.

The CNIL said that the restricted committee believed that making the rejection mechanism more difficult actually deterred users from rejecting cookies and encouraged them to prefer the simplicity of the “accept all” button.

It was determined that this procedure violated Internet users’ rights to free consent and did so in violation of Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act.

According to Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act, services must obtain user consent before storing cookies and give users the option to grant or decline that consent.

As a result, consent dialogues ought to be fair and provide users the choice of selecting either course, which was not the case on the TikTok UK and Ireland websites.

Despite the CNIL constantly alerting TikTok to the problem starting in June 2021, the firm didn’t implement a “Reject All” option until February 2022.