Reddit hit with £14.47m fine over children’s privacy failures

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The UK’s data protection watchdog has issued a £14.47 million fine to Reddit for failing to protect the personal information of children.

An investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), published on February 24, 2026, revealed that despite Reddit’s own terms of service prohibiting under-13s, the company lacked any robust age assurance mechanisms to enforce this rule until mid-2025.

This meant the platform had no lawful basis for collecting and using the personal information of hundreds of thousands of UK children.

A critical component of the ICO’s enforcement action was Reddit’s failure to carry out a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) before January 2025. Under UK law, companies must assess and mitigate risks to children before launching services likely to be accessed by them.

The ICO noted that children under 13 were essentially “hidden in plain sight” on the platform, having their data used in ways they could not understand or control.

While Reddit introduced new age assurance measures in July 2025, including age verification for mature content, the regulator remains critical of the platform’s continued reliance on self-declaration for new accounts. The ICO warned that simply asking a user to type in their age is a method that is “easy to bypass” and does not meet the standard of protection required for high-risk platforms.

“It’s concerning that a company the size of Reddit failed in its legal duty to protect the personal information of UK children,” said John Edwards, UK Information Commissioner. “Companies have a responsibility to ensure children are not exposed to risks through the way their data is used. To do this, they need to be confident they know the age of their users.”

The record fine follows a similar penalty recently issued to MediaLab and is part of a broader crackdown on social media and video-sharing sites. The ICO confirmed it will continue to monitor Reddit’s updated controls and encouraged the wider tech industry to shift away from “self-declaration” models in favour of more robust, effective age assurance technology.

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