PARIS — France’s data protection authority CNIL has fined Chinese-owned video-sharing platform TikTok €5 million for privacy violations.
“TikTok.com users could not refuse cookies as easily as accept them and they were not informed in a sufficiently precise way about the purposes of the different cookies,” the regulator said in a statement released Thursday.
The CNIL’s investigation focused on TikTok’s website, not its mobile app.
The French fine comes at a delicate time for the company. Earlier this week, several European Commissioners warned TikTok’s CEO to respect EU laws and work on “regaining [the] trust of European regulators.”
Two EU-wide privacy probes led by Ireland’s data protection regulator — one of them on child safety and the other one on data transfers to China — are also moving forward.
POLITICO first reported in December that the platform faced privacy fines in France. In the past few years, the CNIL has leaned on the EU’s cookie rules to fine Amazon, Google, Facebook and, last week, Apple.
A spokesperson for TikTok said the French data protection authority’s “findings relate to past practices.” The company is now “making it easier to reject non-essential cookies and providing additional information about the purpose of certain cookies.”
