Leading European Regulator Fines TikTok €530 Million due to concerns about how it protects its users’ information and ordered it to suspend data transfers to China if it does not make the necessary changes to its practices within six months.
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) stated that TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has not demonstrated that the personal data of users in the European Union, to which employees in China have partial access, is protected at a high level in accordance with European Union laws.
The short video platform has not addressed the potential access that Chinese authorities have regarding this data due to counterintelligence and other Chinese laws, which TikTok has stated deviate from European standards, the DPC said in a statement.
TikTok stated that it strongly disputes this claim and that it has used the European Union’s legal framework, known as standard contractual clauses, to enable strictly controlled and limited remote access. It intends to appeal the ruling.
The platform, which has rapidly gained popularity among teenagers worldwide in recent years and has 175 million users in Europe, added that it has never received a request for user data from EU authorities nor has it ever provided such data.
The DPC also found that although TikTok stated during a four-year investigation that it did not store European users’ data on servers in China, the platform admitted last month that a limited amount of data was discovered in China in February, which has since been deleted.
