This change in its conditions of use should allow the social network to display personalized advertising on devices without obtaining prior consent.
Le Monde
Under pressure, Tiktok has announced to “break” the deployment of its new conditions of use in Europe, which was to take place on Wednesday, Techcrunch, Tuesday, July 12, a spokesperson for Techcrunch on Tuesday 12 From data Protection Commission (DPC), the equivalent in Ireland of the National Commission for Data Protection (CNIL). The suspension was then confirmed by a social network spokesperson.
In theory, this Update of the conditions of use of the platform, announced on June 8, was to allow the Chinese video sharing application, used by more 100 million Europeans each month in 2020, to display personalized advertisements on the devices of all its users of the European Union, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, without their prior agreement, which was not possible so far. To justify this turnaround, the company invoked its legitimate interests to “put advertisers in contact with users likely to be interested in their products or services”.
Warning of the Italian CNIL
Several voices were very quickly raised against this forced measure, in particular that of the Guarantor per The Proter Dei Dati Personali, the Italian CNIL, which, in a press release released on Monday , sent a” formal warning “to Tiktok and concluded that the change made by the social network was incompatible according to her with the European EPRIVACY Directive of 2002 on the protection of privacy on the Internet as well as the General Data Protection Regulations (RGPD).
“Tiktok has agreed to break the deployment of these changes in order to allow the DPC to do its analyzes,” detailed the spokesperson for the Irish institution at the Techcrunch site. The European division of Tiktok being located in Ireland, it is indeed on the DPC that the Chinese company depends on its policy in terms of personal data.
Personalized advertisements are a widespread practice on social networks, which draw most of their profits from the announcements broadcast from their users. Tiktok, which has already deployed its new conditions of use everywhere outside Europe since April 2021 , is not the only one to impose this practice on its customers. Instagram or Twitter, for example, already use such targeting, without their users being always aware.
Legally, Digital Service Act , on which European institutions agreed on April 23, prohibits only advertising targeting children or using sensitive data, such as religion or sexual orientation. The practice, now common to all the largest social networks in Europe, is therefore legal but is debated.