Cookies are expensive.

TikTok has been fined 5 million euros in France for not allowing users of its website to simply refuse cookies, the French personal data policeman announced on Thursday.

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.

Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple: all sanctioned

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 amounts to discouraging users from refusing cookies and encouraging them to favor the ease of the "Accept all" button", considers the authority.

"These findings relate to previous practices that we changed last year, including making it easier to opt out of non-essential cookies and providing additional information about the purposes of certain cookies," TikTok responded in a statement to the AFP.

The popular video-sharing app for teenagers, which belongs to 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 app targeted by many critics

Tiktok 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. of minors and on data transfers to China.

These sanctions could be pronounced 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.

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  • TikTok

  • CNIL

  • Fine

  • Advertising

  • high tech

  • Social networks

  • Personal data