TikTok faces $155,000 fine for mishandling child data in South Korea

Popular video-sharing application, TikTok, has been under scrutiny for its subpar data handling methods and ties with the Chinese government. The application was recently banned in India and is currently undergoing a few trials in the US as well.

According to a recent report, TikTok developers are in deep waters in South Korea as well. The Korean Communications Commission (KCC) has fined the company for 186 million or $155,000 for mishandling of child data.

According to the details, KCC acts as the regulator and overwatches the country’s telecommunications and data related sectors just like Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA).

The fine follows reports of ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, failing to protect users’ private data specifically youngsters in the region.

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The fine translates into 3% of the company’s annual sales within the country. This is the pre-decided percentage of fines for such violations under local privacy laws.

The KCC started investigating TikTok’s data handling methods back in October 2019 and found that the company collected data of children under the age of 14 without consent from their legal guardians.

Moreover, TikTok failed to notify the organization that the data was being transferred overseas.

According to the investigation, the Chinese application uses four cloud services, i.e., Alibaba Cloud, Fastly, Edgecast, and Firebase.

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