The European Union on Friday slammed Chinese social media giant TikTok with a massive €345 million ($369 million) fine over breaches related to children's data.
The fine was imposed after Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC), which plays a key role in the EU's efforts to regulate and enforce data protection laws, completed a two-year investigation into the practices of the application.
The watchdog said that it first started to examine TikTok's behaviour in September 2021 as it reviewed whether the application was adhering to Europe's strict General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) regarding processing of personal data for users under 18 years of age.
While TikTok cleared the requirements for ensuring whether users were younger than 13 years of age or not, it found that the platform failed to properly assess risks to younger people who were signing up for the network.
DPC found several gaps and failings of TikTok in how youngsters signed up, what happened immediately afterwards and how children could be exposed to adults.
The DPC slapped TikTok with the fine and gave it three months to alter its current process to comply with EU laws.
Meanwhile, TikTok said it was still evaluating a future course of action.
Last month, Meta -- the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp -- was fined €1.2 billion for transferring data of European Union citizens to the US.