French CNIL fined Tiktok $5.4 Million for violating cookie laws

French data protection watchdog fined short-form video hosting service TikTok €5 million for breaking cookie consent rules.

The Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL) has fined short-form video hosting service TikTok €5 million (about $5.4 million) for violating cookie consent rules.

French data protection watchdog claims that users are not able to refuse cookies, as easily as they accept them, the ByteDance-owned company also failed to sufficiently inform of the purposes of the different cookies

“On December 29, 2022, the CNIL sanctioned the social network TIKTOK for a total amount of 5 million euros for two reasons: users of “tiktok.com” could not refuse cookies as easily as accept them and they could not were not sufficiently informed of the purposes of the different cookies.” reads a statement published by CNIL.

Between May 2020 and June 2022, the CNIL conducted multiple audits on the “tiktok.com” website and on the documents requested from the company by the CNIL. The CNIL only assessed the website in “an unauthenticated space”, while the mobile app was not scrutinized.

“The Restricted Committee considered that making the refusal mechanism more complex actually amounts to discouraging users from refusing cookies and encouraging them to favor the ease of the “Accept all” button.” continues the statement. “She concluded that this process violated the freedom of consent of Internet users and constituted a violation of Article 82 of the Data Protection Act since it was not as simple to refuse cookies as to accept them at the time from online control in June 2021 until the implementation of a “Refuse all” button in February 2022.

On December 2022, French CNIL fined APPLE 8 million euros for not collecting the consent of iPhone’s French users (iOS 14.6 version) before depositing and/or writing identifiers used for advertising purposes on their terminals.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, TikTok)