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 inspection ascertained that the video sharing app s content transfers to China breached strict content privacy rules in the EU Ireland s Content Protection Commission also sanctioned TikTok for not being transparent with users about where their personal input 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 figures 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 statistics 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 announcement TikTok noted it disagreed with the decision and plans to appeal The company commented in a blog post that the decision focuses on a select period ending in May before it embarked on a facts localization project called Project Clover that involved building three records centers in Europe The facts are that Project Clover has specific of the the majority stringent details protections anywhere in the industry including unprecedented independent oversight by NCC Group a leading European cybersecurity firm stated Christine Grahn TikTok s European head of masses approach and executive relations The decision fails to fully consider these considerable facts measure 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 administrators that it poses a protection menace over user figures sent to China In the Irish watchdog also fined the company hundreds of millions of euros in a separate child privacy assessment The Irish watchdog disclosed its inspection detected that TikTok failed to address prospective access by Chinese personnel to European users personal information 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 information from the Chinese executives and has never provided European user evidence to them Under the EU rules known as the General Material Protection Regulation European user content can only be transferred outside of the bloc if there are safeguards in place to ensure the same level of protection Grahn mentioned TikTok strongly disagreed with the Irish regulator s argument that it didn t carry out necessary assessments for content transfers saying it sought advice from law firms and experts She commented 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 probe which opened in September also discovered that TikTok s privacy protocol at the time did not name third countries including China where user input was transferred The watchdog explained the agenda which has since been updated failed to explain that material processing involved remote access to personal details stored in Singapore and the United States by personnel based in China TikTok faces further scrutiny from the Irish regulator which noted that the company had provided inaccurate information to throughout the inquiry by saying that it didn t store European user statistics on Chinese servers It wasn t until April that it informed the regulator that it discovered in February that specific input had in fact been stored on Chinese servers Doyle reported that the watchdog is taking the modern developments very seriously and considering what further regulatory action may be warranted
