London, May 2, (dpa/GNA) – TikTok has been fined €530 million ($601 million) for violating EU personal data protection rules by transferring data to China, an Irish regulator said on Friday.
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) said TikTok breached the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by sharing European user data with China, and violated the bloc’s transparency requirements.
The DPC is the lead supervisory authority for tech giants that have their European headquarters in Ireland, and has imposed fines on Amazon and Meta in the past. It fined TikTok €345 million in 2023 for its handling of data from users under the age of 18.
During the investigation, the video-sharing app said it did not store any user data from Europe on servers in China, but in April admitted that this had happened to a limited extent, the DPC said.
DPC deputy chief Graham Doyle said TikTok was unable to guarantee that data from European users accessed by employees in China was protected in the same way as it was in the EU, as required by GDPR.
The platform did not, for example, take into account the possibility that Chinese authorities could access the data, Doyle said.
According to TikTok, the data has since been deleted, but the DPC said it is still considering further regulatory measures in consultation with EU data protection authorities.
TikTok can still appeal the penalty, which in addition to the fine requires it to adapt its data processing to comply with EU rules within six months.
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is based in China, but the app’s leaders jave repeatedly emphasized that ByteDance is majority-owned by international investors.
ByteDance must nonetheless comply with the requirements of the Chinese authorities through its headquarters in Beijing.
The company has already come under fire in the United States, where experts fear it could allow data from Americans to fall into the hands of the Chinese government.
Former president Joe Biden signed a law into effect a year ago stipulating that ByteDance must divest from its US operations or be banned. His successor, President Donald Trump, has repeatedly extended the deadline for the sale of the app.
GNA
PDC