TikTok has agreed to improve its measures to keep children off its website and app after a Canadian investigation found its efforts to block children and protect personal information were inadequate, Canadian privacy officials said on Tuesday.
The joint investigation into TikTok by Canada’s privacy commissioner Philippe Dufresne and privacy protection authorities in the provinces of Quebec, British Columbia, and Alberta found that hundreds of thousands of Canadian children accessed TikTok each year despite the company stating its platform is not intended for people under the age of 13.
Michael Harvey, information and privacy commissioner for British Columbia, said they were “struck by exactly how elaborate” TikTok’s profiling was.
He said biometrics were used in combination with location data to “create elaborate inferences about who the users were, about things like what their spending power was and use that, to then decide what content, including advertising, to feed back to them.”
“Obviously that’s super sensitive when it comes to children and youth. But we don’t think that even adults had a reasonable expectation that this was happening,” Harvey said.
Depending on the content users upload or view, TikTok may also collect sensitive information about their health, political opinions, gender identity and sexual orientation.
“We noted with concern during a demonstration of TikTok’s advertising portal, the potential for advertisers to target users based on their transgender status,” the report flagged.
“TikTok claimed that this was not supposed to be possible but was unable to explain how or why this option had been available.”