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 scrutiny determined that the video sharing app s details transfers to China breached strict figures privacy rules in the EU Ireland s Figures Protection Commission also sanctioned TikTok for not being transparent with users about where their personal statistics 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 information 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 reported in a message TikTok explained 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 details localization project called Project Clover that involved building three information centers in Europe The facts are that Project Clover has selected of the majority stringent material protections anywhere in the industry including unprecedented independent oversight by NCC Group a leading European cybersecurity firm commented Christine Grahn TikTok s European head of population program and executive relations The decision fails to fully consider these considerable records precaution 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 bureaucrats that it poses a assurance liability over user records sent to China In the Irish watchdog also fined the company hundreds of millions of euros in a separate child privacy analysis The Irish watchdog revealed its probe unveiled that TikTok failed to address probable access by Chinese leadership to European users personal statistics under Chinese laws on anti-terrorism counter-espionage cybersecurity and national intelligence that were identified as materially diverging from EU standards Grahn explained TikTok has has never received a request for European user facts from the Chinese functionaries and has never provided European user material to them Under the EU rules known as the General Facts Protection Regulation European user records can only be transferred outside of the bloc if there are safeguards in place to ensure the same level of protection Grahn announced TikTok strongly disagreed with the Irish regulator s argument that it didn t carry out necessary assessments for evidence transfers saying it sought advice from law firms and experts She announced 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 inspection which opened in September also detected that TikTok s privacy protocol at the time did not name third countries including China where user records was transferred The watchdog commented the program which has since been updated failed to explain that statistics processing involved remote access to personal facts 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 statistics on Chinese servers It wasn t until April that it informed the regulator that it discovered in February that various facts had in fact been stored on Chinese servers Doyle explained that the watchdog is taking the new developments very seriously and considering what further regulatory action may be warranted