The News
Ireland’s privacy regulator fined TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance €530 million ($600 million) Friday for illegally sending user data to China, in an infringement of EU rules.
The watchdog said that the video-sharing platform, which has its EU headquarters in Ireland, had breached the bloc’s data protection rules by sending Europeans’ user data to China without guaranteeing it would be protected under Chinese surveillance laws.
Those laws give Beijing extensive powers to compel firms to hand over user data and “materially diverge from EU standards,” the regulator said.
In April TikTok told the regulator that it discovered some European user data had been stored on servers in China, contradicting previous denials.
TikTok said it would appeal the Irish regulator’s decision, and maintained that it had never provided data to Chinese authorities.