Popular short-form video hosting service TikTok has been fined €5 million (about $5.4 million) by the French data protection watchdog for violating cookie consent rules.
The Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL) stated that the users of ‘tiktok[.]com’ could not refuse cookies as easily as accepting them and they were not informed in a sufficiently precise way of the objectives of the different cookies.
The regulator conducted several audits between May 2020 and June 2022, and found that the company did not offer a straightforward option to refuse all cookies as opposed to just one click for accepting them. The option to “refuse all” cookies was introduced by TikTok in February 2022.
By making the opt-out mechanism more complex discourages the users from refusing cookies and encourages them to prefer the ease of the ‘Accept All’ button. The CNIL stated that it can be considered as a breach of the French Data Protection Act.
Also the ByteDance-owned company, did not inform users of the purposes behind depositing such cookies on users’ systems when visiting tiktok[.]com. The company has since rectified the issues.
According to the regulations, websites are required to withhold all third-party cookies and trackers – which could be used for behavioral advertising or gathering analytics information – until explicit permission from users is obtained.
The fine imposed on TikTok makes it the latest platform to face similar penalties after Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft since 2020.
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