TikTok’s protection of minors should not be opt-in, warns EU

TikTok has drawn formal scrutiny from the European Union over how it protects children on the platform. The European Commission issued preliminary findings under the Digital Services Act that flag specific problems with how minors are safeguarded. The core warning is that protection of minors on TikTok should not be opt-in.

Those findings focus on product defaults rather than optional safety tools. The Commission points to minors’ accounts that are set to public and says TikTok should change those default settings so stronger protections apply without the user having to turn them on. Under that framing, privacy and safety for underage accounts are treated as platform configuration choices, not features parents or teens must discover and enable.

For engineers and product teams building consumer apps, the signal is about default design. If a major platform can be told under the DSA that child protection must ship as the baseline state of an account, then similar default-first expectations can apply to any service with underage users in the EU. Account visibility, public profiles, and related control surfaces become compliance-relevant product decisions, not just growth or engagement settings.

The case also sits in a wider market context where large platforms face EU rules that treat systemic risk and minor protection as enforceable duties. TikTok is not being asked only to publish a safety page; it is being pressed to change how accounts for minors behave by default. Rivals that run social or video products for a young audience will watch how far default-setting requirements go under the DSA.

What to watch next is how TikTok responds to the Commission’s preliminary findings and whether it revises the default privacy posture of minors’ public accounts. Any redesign of those defaults, and how clearly the company can show that protection is on unless a user changes it, will set the practical standard others may be expected to match.