
French CNIL has fined TikTok €5 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, TikTok also failed to sufficiently inform of the purposes of the different cookies
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.
It was 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.