Italy's Privacy Monitoring Committee 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 the "scarf" or "suffocation game" that leads to restricting 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 the 10-year-old girl from Palermo."
The girl died in a 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. The Italian Data Protection Authority said in a statement on Friday that it will ban the (Chinese) social network with immediate effect until February 15, when the network will have to meet the authority’s demands to form strict rules regarding new accounts or those belonging to underage children. In addition to this, "It is unthinkable that social networks become a space in which anything is allowed," said Lisia Ronzoli, head of the Italian Parliamentary Committee for Child Protection.
After a ruling 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 the agency 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 subscribe to use the application, and the incident is not the first of its kind for the TikTok network, 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 rails in order to do a social media trick, and given the app's soaring popularity in recent years, TikTok has spent most of the past year adding more controls to Privacy for user accountsFor the younger ages, as it introduced remote parental controls and allowed parents to change children's privacy settings in the app, and earlier this month TikTok updated the default privacy settings for users between the ages of 13 and 15, placing restrictions on who can view Their videos and comments on them, and despite this, the children's privacy protection authorities demanded to block the TikTok service as it does not do enough to protect children on its platform, which made the Beijing-based parent company ByteDance pay a fine of 5.7 million Dollars 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) in allowing users under the age of 13 to sign the app without their parents' consent.