Italy’s Privacy Control Commission ordered the popular video application TikTok to block the accounts of Italian users whose ages the company could not verify after the background of the death of a 10-year-old girl who was using the Chinese-owned application, and in a statement, the security authority said that despite TikTok’s commitment to ban registration Children under the age of 13, according to the terms and conditions of using the service, but it is very easy to circumvent this rule, and as a result, TikTok said that it had to block user accounts that were not verified until further notice, and a spokeswoman for Tik Tok said In Italy, the company is analyzing the communications received from the authority in order to implement this step, and in a comment, TikTok said: “Privacy and security are the absolute priorities of TikTok. We are constantly working to enhance our policies, processes and technologies to protect our community and young users in particular.”
This decision came after the death of a young girl from suffocation in Palermo in a case that shocked Italy, and her parents said that she was participating in the so-called blackout challenge, or what they refer to as a “scarf” or “suffocation game” that limits oxygen access to the body, She put a belt around her neck and held her breath while recording herself on her phone, adding, “TikTok and YouTube were her world, this is how she was spending her time.” Prosecutors have opened an investigation into possible suicide incitement and are looking to see if someone invited the girl to participate. In this challenge, she said: “The Supervisory Authority decided to intervene urgently in the wake of the horrific case of a 10-year-old girl from Palermo.”
The girl died in Palermo Hospital after her five-year-old sister discovered her on Wednesday in the family bathroom with her mobile phone, which had been confiscated by the police, and Tik Tok said that until this moment she had not been able to identify any content on the site that would encourage the girl to participate in any challenge from this. The Italian Data Protection Authority said that it will ban TikTok with immediate effect until February 15, 2021 when the network will have to meet the authority’s demands to form strict rules regarding new accounts or those belonging to minors. In addition to this, said Lisia Ronzoli, head of the Italian Parliamentary Committee for Child Protection, “It is unimaginable that social networks become a space in which to do anything.”
After a verdict that the girl died of suffocation, the Italian Data Protection Authority said it had imposed an immediate temporary ban on accessing TikTok over any user’s data whose age could not be verified, and added that TikTok was violating a series of violations, including a lack of transparency in the information provided. For users and automatic settings that allegedly do not respect privacy, she also said that TikTok does not pay any attention to the issue of protecting minors, and condemned the ease with which young children can sign up to use the application, and the incident is not the first of its kind for TikTok, as it was revealed. About the death of an 18-year-old who was killed on a train in Pakistan while filming him walking along the tracks in order to do a trick on social media, and given the app’s soaring popularity in recent years, TikTok has spent most of the past year adding more controls to Privacy for younger users’ accounts, as it introduced remote parental controls and allowed parents to change children’s privacy settings in the app, as TikTok had earlier this year For a month, the default privacy settings were updated for users between the ages of 13 and 15, which placed restrictions on who could view and comment on their videos, and despite this, the children’s privacy protection authorities demanded that the TikTok service be blocked as it did not do enough to protect Children on its platform, which made Beijing-based parent company ByteDance, pay a $5.7 million fine to the US Federal Trade Commission in 2019 for an earlier version of TikTok called Musical.ly, over allegations that it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Act. (COPPA) to allow users under the age of 13 to sign for the app without their parents’ consent.
