TikTok has been fined £1.875 million in the U.K. for providing inaccurate data to the official regulator on its parental safety controls.
Delays in reporting the issue disrupted publication of Ofcom’s child safety transparency report, published late last year and aimed at helping parents choose which platforms they and their children use.
As part of the research for the report, Ofcom asked TikTok, Twitch and Snap to explain how they protect children from accessing potentially harmful videos—in the case of TikTok, asking for data on the take-up of its ‘Family Pairing’ parental control feature.
Under the U.K.’s Communications Act 2003, which pre-dates the Online Safety Act, companies are required by law to respond to all statutory information requests from Ofcom in an ‘accurate, complete and timely’ way, including by providing accurate and complete information.
“Ofcom’s job is to scrutinize platforms’ safety features, and gathering information is a critical part of holding tech firms to account,” said Suzanne Cater, Ofcom’s enforcement director.
“When we demand data, it must be accurate and submitted on time. We won’t hesitate to take enforcement action if any company fails to do this.”
But while TikTok responded to Ofcom’s information request on September 4 last year, several weeks later it said that the data it had provided was not accurate, and that it was carrying out an internal investigation to understand the root cause of its inaccuracies.
Ofcom says its investigation into TikTok uncovered a number of failings in its data governance processes. Not only did the submission of inaccurate data stem from insufficient checks, the company was also too slow in bringing the error to Ofcom’s attention, and too slow to fix the issue.
“This delay meant that we were forced, at a late stage, to remove details of the effectiveness of TikTok’s parental controls from the report, materially disrupting our work to promote transparency,” Ofcom said.
And while TikTok subsequently committed to providing accurate information on Family Pairing from an alternative data source, it was slow to give progress updates. It eventually provided accurate, albeit partial, data on March 28 this year—more than seven months after the original deadline.
The £1.875 million fine is actually 25% less than it might have been, as a result of TikTok accepting Ofcom’s findings and settling the case.
A TikTok spokesperson points out that Ofcom acknowledges that the breach didn’t occur deliberately or recklessly, that it was proactive in admitting the problem, and that the company has subsequently made changes to its standard operating procedures to prevent it happening again.
“We inadvertently provided inaccurate information to Ofcom regarding the use of Family Pairing in the UK, which significantly undercounted the actual number of people using this pioneering parenting tool,” he says.
“While we subsequently provided the correct information, we fell short of our obligations by not reporting the error sooner, and apologisz for any disruption this caused. We are committed to fully cooperating with all of Ofcom’s requests and have implemented improvements to our internal processes.”
