Photo: Kon Zografos/Pixaba
Chinese social network TikTok has been fined £12,7m in the UK for failing to protect the privacy of children under the age of 13. In Serbia, this social network is used by 30 percent of people aged 25 to 34, and the number of children is unknown.
The British Data Protection Authority has estimated that TikTok In 2020, it allowed around 1,4 million children under the age of 13 in Great Britain to use the TikTok platform, reports the BBC. A video-sharing site used data from children of that age without parental consent, an investigation by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has found.
TikTok then announced that it has made great efforts to prevent access to the network by people under the age of 13. However, the ICO claims that despite this, many younger children were able to access the network despite TikTok. It was assessed that the data of children who used the network could be used to track and profile them and potentially present harmful or inappropriate content, according to the BBC.
"There are laws in place to ensure our children are as safe in the digital world as they are in the physical world." TikTok did not comply with those laws," said Information Commissioner John Edwards. The resulting evasion of those laws is estimated to have allowed more than a million under-13s to access the platform inappropriately, with TikTok collecting and using their personal data.
Edwards told BBC News that TikTok "did not take any steps" to obtain parental consent.
A TikTok spokesperson told the BBC that the company's 40.000-strong security team is "working around the clock to help keep the platform safe for the community".
In September 2021, TikTok announced that it had surpassed one billion users.
In Serbia, TikTok is used by 30 percent of people aged 25 to 34, and the number of users is also increasing in the 35 to 44 group, according to research Social Serbia 2022. which deals with the use of social networks. It is not known how many minors in Serbia use this social network.
Precisely because of access to younger voters, this platform is increasingly popular among Serbian politicians.
Unlike Facebook or Twitter, which have a long history of spreading disinformation, but also certain mechanisms that more or less control fake news, there is practically no content control on TikTok, so it is very suitable and susceptible to the spread of fake news, "Vreme" wrote in the text. TikTok: A hotbed of fake news about the Ukrainian war. Also, the application does not offer any special tools to fake news researchers, which makes their job difficult - they basically have to do everything manually, unlike other networks, which consequently reduces the ability to monitor and control the network.
MN/FoNet
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