Brazil's National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) fined ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, approximately $30 million (around 153.7 million reais) on August 25 for processing minors' data without a legal basis or adequate safeguards, according to Bloomberg. The penalty adds to a series of recent regulatory actions the authority has taken against social media platforms.
According to Al Jazeera, the authority identified systemic failures in the age-verification mechanism, both in registered accounts and in a sessionless browsing mode that allows users to view content without creating an account. The regulator estimates that TikTok may have processed data from at least 8 million children and adolescents. That sessionless mode is available in Brazil but not in the United States or Europe, where access is restricted to registered users. The decision comes as Brazil, Australia, Canada, and Indonesia push forward rules governing minors' internet use, a debate also underway in Mexico, where the protection of children's data on social networks is being discussed in Congress.
The ANPD ordered the company to delete data collected without legal backing and to build a reinforced youth protection framework. That framework includes automatic privacy adjustments for accounts belonging to users under 16, with any changes requiring parental or guardian consent, expanded parental supervision tools, and stricter content filters. For sessionless browsing, the authority called for suspending advertising, restricting content by age, and disabling comments, direct messages, live streams, and social interaction features. ByteDance may appeal the decision within the next 10 days, according to the regulator. In early August, the ANPD ordered Discord to suspend its live-streaming feature following the death of a 13-year-old girl during a broadcast in which, according to authorities, she was encouraged to harm herself.
ByteDance's appeal will determine whether the penalty stands and whether the precedent consolidates as a model for the region. For Mexico and Latin America, the case now stands as an available reference in designing age-verification standards and parental supervision requirements for platforms.
This article was written with artificial intelligence assistance, drawing on verified sources, and reviewed by a human editor before publication.