Cookies are computer trackers used to track the behavior of Internet users and offer them targeted advertising.

“The checks only related to the Tiktok website (…) and not to the mobile application”, specified in a press release the Commission Informatique et Libertés (Cnil), which pronounced the sanction at the end of 2022.

Since the publication of its new guidelines on cookies in 2020, the Cnil requires sites using cookies to offer a button allowing them to refuse their deposit as easily as to accept them.

“Making the refusal mechanism more complex actually comes down to discouraging users from refusing cookies and encouraging them to favor the ease of the + Accept all + button”, considers the authority.

“These findings concern previous practices that we changed last year, in particular by facilitating the possibility of refusing non-essential cookies and by providing additional information on the purposes of certain cookies”, reacted Tiktok in a declaration to the AFP.

Tiktok, which belongs to the Chinese technology giant Bytedance (officially registered in the Cayman Islands), is the latest foreign group pinned down by the CNIL as part of a major control campaign launched in the spring of 2021.

Google, Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Microsoft and recently Apple have all been sanctioned by the authority for a total amount of around 400 million euros.

The Tiktok application is widely criticized in the United States where it is blocked on the devices of officials, due to suspicions of spying for the benefit of China, against a backdrop of trade tensions between Washington and Beijing.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the social network is in the sights of the Irish Data Protection Authority (DPC), which has informed its European counterparts of two draft sanctions aimed at breaches of data processing. personal data of minors and on the transfer of data to China.

These sanctions could be imposed in the first half of 2023.

Finally, the video sharing application is criticized by politicians for its moderation of content deemed too lax and the addiction it would arouse among the youngest.

© 2023 AFP