TikTok has agreed to pause a controversial privacy policy update in Europe, which had been due to happen tomorrow, and would have meant the platform stopped asking users for their consent to be tracked to receive targeted advertising.
The Irish Data Protection Commission, TikTok’s lead privacy regulator for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, said the pause follows engagement between the oversight office and the tech giant yesterday.
The development follows a formal warning to TikTok from Italy’s data protection watchdog, when the Italian regulator suggested the planned switch, away from asking users for their consent to run personalized ads to claiming it could process the data under a legal ground known as legitimate interest would breach the ePrivacy Directive — and, in its view, the GDPR too.