£12,700,000

Penalty imposed

UK GDPR

15 May 2023

Date on the register

UK GDPR

Law relied on

UK GDPR Article 13, UK GDPR Article 13(1)(a)

Online technology and telecoms

Sector

7 actions on the register

In one line

The ICO fined TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited and TikTok Inc (TikTok) £12,700,000 on 15 May 2023 under the UK GDPR.

01The record

Organisation named: TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited and TikTok Inc (TikTok)
Action: Monetary penalty
Date published: 15 May 2023
Register year: 2023
Law relied on: UK GDPR
Provisions cited: UK GDPR Article 13, UK GDPR Article 13(1)(a), UK GDPR Article 13(1)(b), UK GDPR Article 37(1)(b)
Penalty: £12,700,000
Sector on the register: Online technology and telecoms
ICO register reference: 17275
Register status: Published on the ICO enforcement register, 4 September 2026
Notice documents: 5 PDFs published by the ICO
Sector share of register: 7 of 216 actions (3%)
Actions published that year: 80
Actions under this law: 95
Position on the register: 52nd of 216, oldest first
Published the same day: This entry alone
Rank by penalty size: 3rd of 44 penalties with a published figure

02What happened, and where it sits

TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited and TikTok Inc (TikTok) received an ICO monetary penalty on 15 May 2023. The Commissioner acted under the UK General Data Protection Regulation, citing UK GDPR Article 13, UK GDPR Article 13(1)(a), UK GDPR Article 13(1)(b) and UK GDPR Article 37(1)(b). A fine. The ICO issues a monetary penalty notice setting out the contravention and the sum payable.

The penalty is £12,700,000. That is the 3rd largest of the 44 penalties on this register with a published figure and the largest of the 13 recorded in 2023. UK GDPR penalties are capped at £17.5 million or 4% of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.

TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited and TikTok Inc (TikTok) is filed under Online technology and telecoms, which accounts for 7 of the 216 actions on the register (3%). In 2023 the ICO published 80 enforcement actions in total, 22 of them monetary penalties. 95 actions on the register name UK GDPR.

Counted from the oldest entry forward, this is the 52nd of 216 actions on the register and the 2nd of 7 in Online technology and telecoms. The ICO publishes 5 documents for this action, 8.1 MB in total: "TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited and TikTok Inc (TikTok) monetary penalty notice", "TikTok monetary penalty notice - Annex 2", "TikTok monetary penalty notice - Annex 3", "TikTok monetary penalty notice - Annex 4" and "ICO welcomes Tribunal ruling on preliminary issue raised by TikTok in its appeal of 2023 penalty". They are the authority for everything on this page.

03The ICO's own account

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has issued a £12,700,000 fine to TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited and TikTok Inc (TikTok) for a number of breaches of data protection law, including failing to use children’s personal data lawfully.

Quoted from the ICO's published register entry (ico.org.uk), Open Government Licence v3.0.

The law behind this action

UK GDPR

The UK GDPR is the data protection regime the ICO enforces against controllers and processors. Its upper tier is capped at £17.5 million or 4% of total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.

All 95 register actions under UK GDPR

What a monetary penalty does

A fine. The ICO issues a monetary penalty notice setting out the contravention and the sum payable.

Published notice

04Nearest entries on the register

Closest by sector, law and date
Organisation	Date	Action	Law	Penalty	Sector
LastPass UK Ltd	20 Nov 2025	Monetary penalty	UK GDPR	£1,228,283	Online technology and telecoms
MediaLab.AI, Inc.	4 Feb 2026	Monetary penalty	UK GDPR	£247,590	Online technology and telecoms
Reddit, Inc.	23 Feb 2026	Monetary penalty	UK GDPR	£14,472,500	Online technology and telecoms
Gain Capital UK Limited	10 Mar 2023	Reprimand	UK GDPR	-	Online technology and telecoms
Intelling Ltd	16 Nov 2023	Monetary penalty	PECR 2003	-	Online technology and telecoms

All Online technology and telecoms actions/All 2023 actions/The full register

05Work out an exposure of your own

Article 83 fine calculator

Estimate upper and lower tier exposure from turnover and infringement type, on the same scale the ICO works to.

How a fine is calculated

The Article 83(2) factors, the turnover caps, and how a regulator gets from a contravention to a number.

The ICO profile

How the UK regulator works post-Brexit, the £17.5M and £8.7M UK GDPR caps, and its divergence from the EU regime.

Provenance and independence

Source: ICO enforcement register (ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/), as published on 4 September 2026. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

GDPRFine.com is an independent tracker of ICO enforcement. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Information Commissioner's Office, and it uses no ICO branding. Where the ICO's own wording is reproduced it is quoted and attributed; everything else on these pages is our own summary of the published record.

The ICO's register held 222 entries on that date. 6 of them are prosecutions of named individuals, with ages and home towns in the ICO's own summary. This tracker indexes organisations, so those 6 are excluded and every count on these pages is out of 216. They remain on the ICO's own register.

An entry says what the Commissioner did on the date shown. It is not a statement about the organisation today, and the ICO can amend or remove a register entry at any time. Amounts and provisions are as published by the ICO; where the published notice does not state a figure or name a provision, these pages say so rather than filling the gap. This entry was read from the register page at https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/2023/05/tiktok/.