Today, the EU's top privacy regulator fined TikTok 530 million euros ($600 million) for illegally transferring European users' data to China.
Today, the EU's top privacy regulator fined TikTok 530 million euros ($600 million) for illegally transferring European users' data to China.
The Irish Data Protection Commission is TikTok’s main data privacy regulator in the 27 EU countries, as the company’s European headquarters are in Dublin. The commission said the platform had breached data protection requirements under EU law and gave it six months to stop all illegal transfers, Reuters reports . TikTok currently has 175 million users across Europe.
Throughout the four-year investigation, TikTok said it did not store EU user data on servers in China. In April, the company said it had stored a limited amount of data in China, which was later deleted.
“TikTok did not consider the potential access of Chinese authorities to the personal data of EU citizens under Chinese anti-terrorism, counter-intelligence and other laws that TikTok identified as significantly different from EU standards,” said Graham Doyle, the Commission’s Deputy Commissioner for Data Protection.
The company said it would fully appeal the decision and that it had never received a request for European user data from Chinese authorities and had never provided that data.
