The fine comes from France’s data protection regulator — Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL) — which deemed TikTok to be in violation of Article 82 of France’s data protection laws. The CNIL noted that while TikTok UK and TikTok Ireland offered a simple prompt and button for users to accept all cookies immediately, rejecting them was not as easy and required several clicks to do so. “The restricted committee considered that making the refusal mechanism more complex actually discouraged users from refusing cookies and encouraged them to prefer the ease of the ‘accept all’ button,” the CNIL said.

“It concluded that this process infringed the freedom of consent of Internet users and constituted a violation of Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act.” Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act stipulates that services must secure user consent for cookie storage and allow the user to give or deny such permission. Therefore, consent dialogues should be balanced and allow the user to choose either option, which was not the case on TikTok’s UK and Ireland sites. Despite the CNIL repeatedly warning TikTok of the issue from June 2021, it took the company until February 2022 to add a “Reject All” option.