TikTok, Reddit and Imgur are to be investigated by the UK’s knowledge safety watchdog over how they use teenage customers’ private data.
The Data Commissioner’s Workplace (ICO) stated it desires to look into how video-sharing app TikTok makes use of data from customers aged 13 to 17 to ship content material suggestions to them.
The investigations into on-line discussion board web site Reddit and image-sharing web site Imgur will concentrate on their use of age assurance measures, akin to how they estimate and confirm kids’s ages, and the way they use their private data.
The regulator is taking motion amid rising considerations about how social media platforms use knowledge generated by kids’s on-line exercise of their advice algorithms – and the potential for younger individuals to be served dangerous or inappropriate content material consequently.
TikTok’s algorithm powers the For You Web page, which recommends movies to customers based mostly on the content material they have interaction with on the app.
A research beforehand discovered the app was suggesting consuming dysfunction and self-harm content material to some new teen accounts inside minutes.
Data commissioner John Edwards stated the regulator desires to make sure the websites’ processes are “robust”.
Mr Edwards stated he expects “to find that there will be many benign and positive uses of children’s data in their recommender systems”, in addition to “elements that are designed to keep children safe”.
“What I am concerned about is whether they are sufficiently robust to prevent children being exposed to harm, either from addictive practices on the device or the platform, or from content that they see, or from other unhealthy practices,” he continued.
He insisted the common isn’t “picking on TikTok” by together with it within the investigation and stated the selection was motivated by “the direction of growth travel in relation to young users, market dominance and potential for harm”.
“We’ve got to choose one – we can’t spread ourselves too thinly,” he stated. “We hope to learn lessons that the whole industry will be able to adopt.”
The ICO stated its investigations will study whether or not there have been any knowledge safety infringements, and if proof of potential breaches is discovered, it would put the knowledge to the platforms for his or her enter earlier than reaching a conclusion.
