TikTok, what happens from February 9 for under 13 profiles

After the measures of the privacy guarantor of the past weeks TikTok has set to work to prevent the procedure against him, for the violation of the European General Regulation for the protection of personal data and of the Italian laws on the subject, from continuing on his way, reaching a potential millionaire fine. For this from Tuesday 9 February, within the numerous measures launched both in recent months and after the urgent authority order, all Italian users of the platform will be required to confirm their date of birth. A further verification of the age that in reality it will be very easy to dodge but which will at least lead to a first skimming and the consequent closure of accounts that will be linked to under 13.

Basically, from 9 February all users will receive a sort of warning that will block the use of the app until they indicate their date of birth again. The next step, on the other hand also indicated by some members of the guarantor’s college, will be that ofactive profile analysis: starting from the choices and methods of use of the accounts, the Chinese platform must be able to assign a probable age range to accounts, which may therefore also be requested subsequently further verification. A bit along the lines, albeit to a lesser extent given the lack of the web of Google accounts, than YouTube does. They will therefore come enhanced artificial intelligence systems, useful to reclaim the platform as much as possible – which in Italy is used by nearly 10 million people, largely in the youth groups. The guarantor will periodically verify the effectiveness of these measures and in the meantime will continue the investigation against other apps such as Facebook and Instagram for the same issues, opened a few days after the provision on TikTok. Those, that is, children who use them and shouldn’t.

To further support these measures, TikTok has also launched a awareness campaign on security both within the app and on other media channels in Italy to raise awareness and education on the security tools and features available to everyone. There are not a few and often parents and educators do not know them: they basically revolve around functionality Family connection through which parents can make their children’s accounts private, block or limit direct messages, define limits on the time spent online, from 40 to 120 minutes, restrict the display of content or disable the search field.

“Our Community Guidelines clarify that TikTok does not allow content that encourages, promotes or glorifies dangerous behavior that could cause injury – the company explained a few days ago – we use a combination of technologies and human control to identify, review and remove content. that violate any of these guidelines. Our most recent Transparency Report, which reveals the amount of content we remove from TikTok and why we do so, shows that 96% of the videos we deleted were removed before a user reported it, while 90% was removed before receiving a single view ‘. Furthermore, it is already possible to report profiles that appear to belong to children through a special button within the app. Here is a video tutorial to do it.

As early as December TikTok had introduced a series of innovations in terms of guarantees for underage users: For example, when a new user profile is created by a child between 13 and 15, the account will be private by default. There are also restrictions on who can comment on videos created by users aged 13 to 15. The latter can choose between Friends or None, while the Everyone option is excluded. Users aged 13-15 cannot use Direct Messages. However, for all the others, the function does not allow you to attach photos or videos and does not allow you to send spontaneous / unsolicited messages to other users. Finally, users between the ages of 13 and 15 cannot host a live stream.