Tiktok’s owner, Bytedance, was fined € 530 million by the European Union for illegally sending user data to China, warning the company that it did not do enough to keep information out of reach of Chinese state services.
Ireland’s data protection committee, the company’s main regulator in Europe, said Tiktok violated the bloc rules with data transfers and gave six months to suspend all illegal transfers.
The DPC stated that Tiktok released in April that data from European users were stored on servers in China – contradicting previous evidence sent to the regulator. Bloomberg reported the fine previously.
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“Tiktok has not addressed the possible access of Chinese authorities to EEE personal data under Chinese anti -terrorism laws, counter -espionage and other laws identified by Tiktok as materially divergent of EU standards,” said Graham Doyle, DPC’s deputy commissioner.
Tiktok said it would completely appeal to the decision and have never received a data request from European users from Chinese authorities and never provided data from European users to them.
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The penalty is the third largest according to the rules of the General Regulation on Data Protection (GDPR), after previous fines of 1.2 billion euros against the Platforms Goal and 746 million euros against Amazon.
Tiktok has been in the sights of the Irish regulator before. In September 2023, he was fined 345 million euros for alleged failures in the way he takes care of children’s personal data.
The inspection agency also sounded the alarm about large technology companies that send personal data from European citizens out of the bloc.
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Irish investigation into Tiktok began in 2021, when the then head of the regulator claimed that EU user data could be accessed by “maintenance engineers and was in China.”
In addition to privacy, Tiktok is also under investigation as part of the EU content moderation rules, the Digital Services Act, due to suspicions that it did not have enough to prevent false accounts and foreign powers from interfering with last year’s Romanian presidential election.
The platform was also investigated for its addictive design and supposed failure to protect smaller ones that use it.
