Irish privacy watchdog hits TikTok with 530 million euro fine in China data transfer investigation
LONDON AP European Union privacy watchdogs fined TikTok million euros million on Friday after a four-year research identified that the video sharing app s details transfers to China breached strict details privacy rules in the EU Ireland s Statistics Protection Commission also sanctioned TikTok for not being transparent with users about where their personal content was being sent and it ordered the company to comply with the rules within six months The Irish national watchdog serves as TikTok s lead details privacy regulator in the -nation EU because the company s European headquarters is based in Dublin TikTok failed to verify guarantee and demonstrate that the personal facts of European users remotely accessed by staff in China was afforded a level of protection essentially equivalent to that guaranteed within the EU Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle explained in a declaration TikTok disclosed it disagreed with the decision and plans to appeal The company reported in a blog post that the decision focuses on a select period ending in May before it embarked on a input localization project called Project Clover that involved building three information centers in Europe The facts are that Project Clover has certain of the the majority stringent figures protections anywhere in the industry including unprecedented independent oversight by NCC Group a leading European cybersecurity firm noted Christine Grahn TikTok s European head of general approach and governing body relations The decision fails to fully consider these considerable records defense measures TikTok whose parent company ByteDance is based in China has been under scrutiny in Europe over how it handles personal information of its users amid concerns from Western representatives that it poses a safeguard exposure over user statistics sent to China In the Irish watchdog also fined the company hundreds of millions of euros in a separate child privacy inspection The Irish watchdog disclosed its scrutiny discovered that TikTok failed to address prospective access by Chinese officials to European users personal input under Chinese laws on anti-terrorism counter-espionage cybersecurity and national intelligence that were identified as materially diverging from EU standards Grahn reported TikTok has has never received a request for European user evidence from the Chinese officials and has never provided European user material to them Under the EU rules known as the General Facts Protection Regulation European user material can only be transferred outside of the bloc if there are safeguards in place to ensure the same level of protection Grahn explained TikTok strongly disagreed with the Irish regulator s argument that it didn t carry out necessary assessments for statistics transfers saying it sought advice from law firms and experts She declared TikTok was being singled out even though it uses the same legal mechanisms that thousands of other companies in Europe does and its approach is in line with EU rules The scrutiny which opened in September also detected that TikTok s privacy program at the time did not name third countries including China where user information was transferred The watchdog declared the approach which has since been updated failed to explain that content processing involved remote access to personal statistics stored in Singapore and the United States by personnel based in China TikTok faces further scrutiny from the Irish regulator which commented that the company had provided inaccurate information to throughout the inquiry by saying that it didn t store European user details on Chinese servers It wasn t until April that it informed the regulator that it discovered in February that particular figures had in fact been stored on Chinese servers Doyle disclosed that the watchdog is taking the latest developments very seriously and considering what further regulatory action may be warranted
