The Tiktok logo is seen outside the Los Angeles offices of the Chinese video application company on April 4, 2025 in Culver City, California.
Robyn Beck | AFP through Getty Images
Tiktok has been fueled 530 million euros ($ 601.3 million) by the Ireland Privacy Regulator to send user data to China.
The Ireland Data Protection Commission (DPC), which leads to the supervision of privacy for Tiktok in the EU, said Friday that Tiktok violated the GDPR Data Protection Law of the block in data transfers from European user data to China.
The regulator ordered Tiktok to fulfill its data processing within six months and said it would suspend Tiktok transfers to China if the processing is not fulfilled within that period.
“Tiktok personal data transfers to China violated the GDPR because Tiktok could not verify, guarantee and demonstrate that the personal data of the EEE users, remotely accessed by the staff in China, had a level of protection estates,” said the attached commissioner of the DPC, in a statement on Friday.
“As a result or the failure of Tiktok to undertake the necessary evaluations, Tick did not address the potential access by Chinese authors to the personal data of the EEE under Chinese anti -terrorism, counter -espionage and other laws identified by.
The DPC said it also found that Tiktok had provided inaccurate information to his consultation when he said he had stored the data of European users about servers located in China. Tiktok informed the regulator this month that he discovered a problem in February where the limited data of European users had been stored in servers in China, unlike their previous statements.
The DPC takes the problem “very strongly” and is considering which additional regulatory action can be justified in consultation with its fellow EU data protection authorities, Doyle said.
Tiktok said he does not agree with the decision of the Irish regulator and plans to appeal in its entirety.
In a blog post on Friday, Christine Grahn, director of public policies of Tiktok and government relations for Europe, said the decision did not take into account the Clover project, a data security initiative of 12 billion euros aimed at protecting the data of European users.
“On the other hand, it focuses on a selection period of years ago, before the implementation of Clover 2023 and does not reflect the safeguards now instead,” said Grahn.
“The DPC itself registered in its report what Tiktok has said constantly: he has never resorted to a request for European user data from Chinese authors, and has never provided them with data from European users,” he added.
Tiktok has previously recognized that China’s staff can access user data.
In 2022, he said in an update of his privacy policy that employees in the countries where China, Brazil, Canada and Israel operate, access to user data is allowed to guarantee
Western policies and regulators are concerned about data transfers from Tiktok users could lead Beijing to access data to spy on users with the application. According to Chinese law, technology companies must deliver to user data to the Chinese government if it is requested to help with a “intelligence work” vaguely defined.
For his part, Tiktok has insisted that he has never sent user data to the Chinese government. In 2023, Tiktok chief, Shou Zi Chew, said in the written testimony for an audience of the United States Congress that the application “has never shared, or has received a request to share, the data from the users of the United States with the Chinese government.”
