TikTok has agreed to pay a £12.7m fine imposed by Britain’s data watchdog in 2023, dropping a long-running appeal and closing one of the most closely watched privacy cases in UK tech. The Information Commissioner’s Office confirmed on Thursday that the video platform had withdrawn its challenge to the penalty notice, along with a separate appeal against an information notice covering how the app recommends content to young users.
The original investigation found that an estimated 1.75 million children under 13 used TikTok in the United Kingdom during 2020, despite the company’s own minimum age rule and UK data protection law requiring parental consent for younger children. Regulators say the firm breached several duties under the GDPR, including obligations around lawfulness, transparency and children’s privacy.
For years TikTok contested the ruling, arguing it could not be expected to police every account and that its age checks met the standards of the time. Those arguments are now off the table. In a statement posted by the ICO, the regulator said the withdrawal means it can press ahead with the second line of inquiry it had paused, which looks directly at the recommender systems that decide what children are shown.
The money itself is modest by big tech standards. The £12.7m figure was the maximum the watchdog could impose under the rules in force when the penalty was issued, and the case was heard under the Guardian reporting of The Guardian. What matters more is the precedent. It signals that platforms which lose privacy appeals to the tribunals may now find settlement cheaper than another round of litigation, particularly with children’s data drawing attention from legislators on both sides of the Atlantic.
There is a wider context here too. Government ministers have repeatedly threatened tighter rules on how platforms verify ages, and Ofcom’s powers under the Online Safety Act are still being tested in court by other companies. TikTok’s climbdown will be read in Whitehall as evidence that regulators can hold their nerve on child safety cases, even against firms with deep legal budgets.
The company has not said whether it will revisit how it screens the age of new users in Britain. It did not respond to a request for comment beyond confirming the appeals had been withdrawn. The ICO says its recommender systems investigation continues.