UK ICO Fines Reddit £14.5M for Child Data Breaches

The UK's Information Commissioners Office has fined Reddit £14.5 million for unlawfully processing the personal data of children under 13, leaving them potentially exposed to inappropriate and harmful content on the platform. The penalty, announced this week, marks the largest ever issued by the regulator for a breach of children's privacy and stems from an investigation into the US-based social media site's age verification practices before mid-2025.

According to the ICO, Reddit lacked robust mechanisms to verify users' ages until July 2025, despite its terms of service prohibiting anyone under 13 from creating accounts. The platform relied solely on self-declared ages during sign-up, a method the regulator described as easily bypassed and insufficient to protect young users. This failure meant Reddit had no lawful basis under UK data protection laws for collecting and using the personal information of children under 13, who could not fully understand, consent to or control how their data was handled.

The ICO's probe estimated that in 2024, around 537,000 children visited Reddit in the UK, with approximately 226,000 of them under 13. These young users were able to access the...