Popular short video making app TikTok has been fined about €5.4 million by the French data protection supervised agency for breaking cookie consent .
Tiktok become the latest platform to face such penalties after Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft since 2020.Users of tiktok have not refused cookies as easily as accepting them and they were not informed in a sufficiently more accurate way of the objectives of the different cookie.
The regulator said that it has conducted several audits between May 2020 and June 2022.
This company did not offer a straightforward option to refuse all cookies as opposed to just one click for accepting them. The option to “refuse all” cookies was introduced by TikTok much latter in February 2022.
It makes the opt-out mechanism more complex is actually discouraging users from refusing cookies and encouraging them to prefer the ease of the ‘Accept All’ button.
Image source: Tiktoknewsroom
Moreover TikTok has not informed users the purposes behind depositing such cookies on users’ systems when visiting tiktok website.The company has since corrected the issues.
While cookie consent banners have been become increasingly common in the wake of the E.U. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018.It has repeatedly observed that these companies resort to illegal dark patterns to trick users into sharing more personal information.
Under the laws, websites are required to withhold all these third-party cookies and trackers which could be used for behavioral advertising or gathering analytics information of users until explicit permission from its users is obtained.
The development also comes weeks after the CNIL penalized Apple for not obtaining’ consent of iphone users in iOS 14.6 prior to using identifiers to present targeted ads on the App Store in violation of the E.U. ePrivacy Directive.
