Ireland is at the center of the GDPR regime as Dublin hosts the European headquarters of TikTok and Google, Meta and X, formerly Twitter.
TikTok, a division of Chinese tech giant ByteDance, is extremely popular among youth with 150 million users in the United States and 134 million in the European Union.
In response to Friday’s fine, TikTok said it “respectfully disagrees” with the decision and is “evaluating” how to proceed.
“The DPC’s criticism focuses on features and settings that were in place three years ago and that we made changes to before the investigation began, such as blocking all accounts under 16,” a TikTok spokesperson told AFP. “Set to private by default.”