Nottingham Forest owner sues Crystal Palace over ‘gun banner’
by: Adham Harker
August 13, 2026
On 4 July 2025, the First-tier Tribunal (‘FTT’) found that the Information Commissioner’s Office (‘ICO’) had acted within its powers when it issued a £12.7 million Monetary Penalty Notice (‘MPN’) to TikTok for various breaches of data protection law, including failing to use children’s personal data lawfully.
The ICO issued the MPN to TikTok in April 2023 after it found that up to 1.4 million UK children under the age of 13 used its platform in 2020, contrary to TikTok’s own terms of service. The ICO determined that TikTok failed to carry out adequate checks to identify and remove underage children from its platform. TikTok also used personal data belonging to children under 13 without parental consent (which is required of organisations offering information society services to children under UK data protection law).
The ICO’s original notice of intent for TikTok set the fine at £27 million. Following consideration of representations from TikTok, the ICO set the final fine amount to £12.7 million.
TikTok appealed the MPN. It argued that as its platform promotes creativity, it was processing data for ‘special purposes’ (in particular, artistic purposes) pursuant to section 174 of the Data Protection Act 2018 (‘DPA’). Where data is processed for special purposes, additional restrictions on the ICO’s enforcement action apply: a determination under section 174 of the DPA must have taken effect and a court must have granted leave for a MPN to be issued. TikTok argued that the ICO had acted outside its authority as it had not obtained the court’s approval before issuing the MPN, and therefore the MPN should be quashed.
The FTT disagreed with TikTok. It held that the MPN was only issued in relation to TikTok’s processing of personal data of children under 13, not to its processing personal data for special purposes. This is because, given TikTok’s terms of service did not permit children under 13 to use its platform, the processing of their data could not be said to be for the purposes of facilitating their use of the platform (irrespective of whether the processing of other users’ data could amount to processing of data for ‘special purposes’). The MPN otherwise related to TikTok’s failure to provide sufficiently clear information to its users, which related to breaches of procedural obligations, not to any processing of personal data.
This was a determination of a preliminary issue in TikTok’s appeal against a MPN. Unless TikTok appeals the decision, the FTT will now proceed to consider the substantive appeal against the findings of breach and the penalty amount.
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