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by: Adham Harker
August 13, 2026
The Information Commissioner’s Office (or ‘ICO’), the UK’s data protection regulator, announced on 24 February 2026, that it has issued the forum platform Reddit with a £14.47million fine for failing to implement a robust age verification mechanism and thereby unlawfully processing personal data of children under the age of 13, and potentially exposing them to harmful content.
Reddit’s terms of service prohibit children under 13 using its platform, but it did not put effective measures in place to verify the ages of users until July 2025. The ICO believes that the measures which Reddit now has in place may yet be insufficient because they rely too heavily on so-called self-determination. Reddit had also failed to carry out a data protection impact assessment on the risks to child users prior to January 2025, despite the platform being open to use by teenagers aged 13-18.
The ICO has made safeguarding children’s personal information a key priority for some time. It launched the Children’s Code (Age Appropriate Design Code) – a set of 15 statutory standards by which online services are expected to meet the requirements of the UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018 in respect of children – in September 2020, and has been seeking to enforce compliance with the Code since September 2021. In April 2024, it published its Children’s Code strategy explaining the work it has done since the introduction of the Code, and it has since published regular updates. The fine of Reddit, was shortly preceded by the announcement of a fine of MediaLab.AI, which runs image sharing platform Imgur, for similar breaches.
The fines suggest an escalation in the ICO’s approach to enforcement. The standards required by the Children’s Code overlap in part with the requirements of the Online Safety Act 2023 (‘OSA’) which introduced sweeping regulation of online content more generally. A different regulator – Ofcom (the UK’s broadcast and telecoms watchdog) – has been tasked with developing codes of practice for and enforcing compliance with the OSA. The ICO and Ofcom have stated that they will work closely together to ensure that their efforts are coordinated.
Max Campbell
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