The French gendarme of personal data had already sanctioned for the same reasons of other major digital players, such as Google, Meta (Facebook) or Apple.
Mo12345lemonde with AFP
Tiktok, the application for sharing video prized for adolescents, was sanctioned in France with a fine of 5 million euros for not having allowed the users of his website to simply refuse cookies, announced Thursday, January 12, the National Commission for Data Protection (CNIL) Thursday, January 12, the French gendarme of personal data.
Cookies are computer tracers used to follow the behavior of Internet users and offer them targeted advertisements. “The controls only focused on the Tiktok website (…) and not on the mobile application,” the CNIL said in a press release, which pronounced the sanction at the end of 2022.
Since the publication of its new guidelines on cookies, in 2020, the CNIL requires sites using hooks to offer a button allowing to refuse their deposit as easily as accepting them.
“Making the more complex refusal mechanism is actually to discourage users from refusing cookies and encouraging them to favor the ease of the” Accept “” button, considers authority. “These findings concern previous practices that we modified last year, in particular by facilitating the possibility of refusing non -essential cookies and providing additional information on the purposes of certain cookies,” reacted Tiktok in a declaration Agency France-Presse (AFP).
of previous sanctions against the GAFAM
Tiktok, which belongs to the large Chinese Bytedance technology group (officially registered in the Cayman Islands), is the last foreign group pinned by the CNIL as part of an important control campaign triggered in the spring of 2021. Google, Meta ( Facebook), Amazon, Microsoft and, lately, Apple have all been sanctioned by the authority for a total amount of around 400 million euros.
The Tiktok application is widely criticized in the United States, where it is blockages on civil servants’ devices, due to suspicions of espionage in favor of China, against the backdrop of trade tensions between Washington and Beijing.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the social network is in the viewfinder of the Irish data protection commission (or DPC, for Data Protection Commission), which expressed its European counterparts of two projects Sanctions aimed at shortcomings on the processing of personal data from minors and on data transfer to China. These sanctions could be pronounced in the first half of 2023.
Finally, the video sharing application is criticized by political leaders its moderation of the content deemed too lax and the addiction it would arouse among the youngest.