The Ireland Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced on Thursday, July 10, the opening of a new Tiktok survey about the storage of European user data on servers in China, the regulator announced in a statement this Thursday, July 10.
This survey follows a previous dispute, which led this same Irish commission inflicted a fine of 530 million euros in Tiktok in May. The DPC has already estimated that Tiktok did not sufficiently protect the personal data of its European users.
The social network, which belongs to the Chinese company Bytedonce, had assured at the time the data in question were not stored on Chinese servers, but simply remotely accessible by Tiktok staff who worked in China.
RGPD damage
But the DPC had been informed in April by the powerful social network (1.5 billion users) that European data had been stored in China and since they were eliminated. Tiktok had mentioned “a technical problem.”
Once again, the company is exposed to having to pay a great fine for having violated the general data protection regulations (GDPR), adopted at European level in 2016, strictly frames the transfer of data outside the EU borders.
European data can only be transferred, that is, stored or accessible in a third country only if the EU judges it safe enough such as Japan, the United Kingdom or the United States.
In the absence of such green light, it depends on the company to demonstrate that the level of protection is equivalent, what Tiktok could not do. According to the company, European data is stored by default in Norway, Ireland and the United States.
The Irish Data Protection Commission is competent and acts on the name of the EU because the European Tiktok headquarters is in Dublin, as most technological companies, attracted by a very favorable fiscal framework.
Also in Trump’s viewfinder
Tiktok has been in the viewfinder of Western governments for years, who fear his link with Beijing and a possible use of its users for espionage or propaganda purposes.
The Irish regulator has already inflicted a fine of 345 million euros in Tiktok in 2023 for breaking European rules in the processing of minors.
The heaviest fine of the DPC had received a goal in 2023: 1.2 billion euros related to the transfer of data to the United States despite the fears of surveillance at that time by US services.
Tiktok is also in the sights of the United States, where Congress voted in 2024 an imposing law in the byteed to produce its control in the territory, under penalty of prohibition.
“We have a buyer” for the American entity of Tiktok, he assured Donald Trump at the end of June in an interview with the Fox News channel, without further details.
Source: BFM TV
