TikTok has been fined £1.875 million after failing to provide Ofcom with accurate information about its parental controls.
The delay in reporting the issue led ta disruption to the publication of Ofcom’s child safety transparency report.
Regulated companies are required by law to respond to all statutory information requests from Ofcom in an accurate, complete and timely way. Ofcom’s report planned to highlight the safety measures in place to protect children from harmful content.
Ofcom was looking for information on the parental controls feature, “Family Pairing”. It wanted to assess the effectiveness in protecting teenage users, but also to help inform parents so they could make decisions about which platforms they and their children use.
TikTok initially responded to Ofcom on 4 September 2023, but on 1 December 2023 it told the regulator the data it had provided was not accurate and it was conducting an internal investigation to find out why.
Ofcom launched an inquiry that uncovered a number of failings in TikTok’s data governance processes. TikTok was found to have insufficient checks in place leading to an inaccurate data submission in the first place, but it was also slow in bringing the error to the regulator’s attention or to remedy the issue.
TikTok subsequently committed to providing accurate information on “Family Pairing” from an alternative data source. But despite Ofcom pressing for progress updates, Ofcom had to wait until 28 March 2024 to receive its information – more than seven months after the original deadline.
