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Korea's privacy watchdog issued a 10 billion won ($7 million) fine to TikTok after finding that the platform tracked the online activity of over 9 million local users across other websites and apps without valid consent.
The Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) decided to impose a 10.3 billion won administrative fine on TikTok for violating the Personal Information Protection Act during its plenary meeting on Wednesday. Two Apple affiliates — Apple Distribution International and Apple Services — were also fined 252 million won for the same violation.
TikTok distributes free behavioral data collection tools, such as TikTok Pixel and Events SDK, to help advertisers measure the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. Behavioral data refers to records that can reveal a user's interests or preferences based on activity on websites or applications, such as purchases, adding items to a shopping cart, searches, content viewing and downloads. About 71,000 companies in Korea use TikTok's behavioral data collection tools.
However, the PIPC found that TikTok collected users' activity records from third-party websites and apps through those tools, linked the information to users' TikTok accounts and used it to provide personalized advertisements. TikTok had 9.45 million active users in Korea as of December 2025. The collected information also included identifiers indicating whether users were using Google's Android or Apple's iOS operating system.
The issue is that TikTok failed to clearly inform users during the sign-up process that it would collect such personal information. PIPC also concluded that users were effectively required to consent to the collection of personal information for personalized advertising to use the app.
"Users were never given a real choice," a PIPC official said. "[TikTok] bundled consent for personalized advertising with consent required to use the [app’s] service and effectively required users to allow the collection of behavioral data from third-party services."
The commission also found that TikTok Lite transferred users' personal information to overseas affiliates without properly disclosing what information would be transferred, the purpose of the transfer or how long the data would be retained. Launched three years ago, TikTok Lite rewards users with cash-equivalent incentives for watching videos and inviting friends to the platform.
The PIPC concluded that the company had violated regulations governing the collection, use and overseas transfer of personal information. Along with the 10.3 billion won fine, the commission ordered the company to implement corrective measures and publicly disclose them.
Apple was also found to have failed to follow proper procedures when processing personal information. The tech giant collected transcripts generated from Siri users' voice recordings and used them to improve the voice assistant's speech recognition without obtaining separate user consent, according to the commission.
Apple also reportedly failed to adequately disclose in its privacy policy the types of personal information transferred to its U.S. affiliate.
However, Apple cooperated with PIPC and introduced a separate consent process for the use of voice recordings and strengthened safeguards by filtering personal information contained in the recordings during the investigation process. The company also revised its privacy policy and corrected the violations. The PIPC imposed a 252 million won administrative fine and ordered Apple to improve its management of overseas data transfers.
“Consent must be given freely after individuals have been fully informed about how their personal information will be processed,” said a PIPC official. "The same personal information protection rules apply to overseas companies when they process the personal information of users in Korea.”
BY KIM MIN-WOOK [[email protected]]
